Decay Inevitable

CHAPTER ONE: SUDDENLY, AT HOME

IF THIS JOB was a dog, I’d have it put down.

Sean watched Sally let the steering wheel spin back through her hands as the squad car righted itself; a fluid movement. It was early, no need to use the sirens, a good hour and a half before the traffic began to breed. Sally was a good driver and she drove best when she was telling a story. She was deep into one now.

“Next time I took a wander along Loampit Vale, Hunter had shrunk. He was about two foot six. He was kneeling down on the floor counting the coins he’d made from that morning’s begging.”

Sean watched the dawn parade of buildings stream past the liquid windows. Limp Christmas decorations hung from telegraph poles like ropes of phlegm. Neon lights sizzled: Happy 2K9. Static barked from his PR; his first coffee of the day was a greased, tepid knot in the centre of his chest. He was glad of Sally’s persistent murmur. He hated getting the Devil’s Hour calls; they were always the worst. This morning looked like being a total bastard. On the shift ten minutes and already there was someone intent on ruining his good mood. He thought of his bed, probably still warm but getting colder by the minute.

“I actually says to him, ‘Come on there, Hunter. Up and at ’em. Bow down for royalty if you like but I’m a far cry from that.’ I didn’t realise, did I – the bastards at the nick never told me – poor Hunter there’s had both his legs off. Thrombosis. Been injecting Temazepam. I gave him a quid – he saw the funny side.”

Slowing now, switching off the police lights, coasting into George Lane, the disused Hither Green hospital on their left a series of black shapes against the failing dark. Sally parked on Lullingstone Lane and they waited for a moment, the engine’s tick a strange comfort as it cooled.

Sean assessed the buildings. “Which one does the girl live in?” he asked.

“That one there. Number fifty-six. Bottom flat. The call came in from a neighbour who lives across the way. He said he saw someone creeping about outside her window.”

“Really? What’s he doing up so late? Wristing himself off watching her curtains?”

“He works nights. Security guard at the hospital.”

“We’re going to get piss-wet through,” Sean said.

Sally opened her door; late December wind knifed them. “It’s good for the skin. Come on.”

They searched the gardens and gulleys surrounding the flat, Sally with markedly greater conviction than her partner. Sean knocked on the door of fifty-six and was about to suggest to Sally that they visit the man who had made the emergency call when he saw movement: a face peering from the window of the woman’s home.

“Sally, there’s someone watching us,” he said, and, to the face, stridently: “Would you mind opening the front door, please, sir?”

It was a pasty-faced thirty-something in a towelling robe that greeted them. Nuggets of sleep in the corners of his eyes. Bed hair.

“Sorry to bother you, sir,” droned Sean, going through the motions. He felt like a glove puppet in an act that hadn’t changed for decades. “We’ve had word of a prowler in the area. Have you seen anything? Heard anything?”

The guy shook his head. “I was asleep. Your torches woke me up.”

“Is there anyone else in the flat that might have heard anything?”

The guy looked back over his shoulder. When he returned his gaze to Sean he was wearing a sleepy grin. “Luce, my girlfriend, she’s asleep too. You’d have had to drive your car through the wall to wake her up.”

“Very sorry… If you should happen… don’t hesitate… Goodnight, then.” All of that jargon made him ill. The constabulary vocabulary; nobody believed the politeness had any depth. He was even starting to speak like a policeman at home. It wouldn’t be long before he flipped his notebook out to give Rachel a report on how the weekly shop had gone.

Flapping through the rain, Sean and Sally hurried back to the car. While Sally negotiated the quiet roads back to the main street, Sean called in to let control know the score.

I hate this job.

It was a different job to the one that had been sold to him. A memory, unbidden, expanded in his mind like a drop of oil in water. Coming home one evening on the train with a friend who had recently enlisted, Christmas bags forming a barrier between them, Sean had been asked what he wanted to make of his life, the odd jobs and dole cheques having left him without any sense of progression.

“You could do worse than join up,” his friend had told him. His cheeks were florid from a spirited chill wind and the beer they had consumed with their dinner. “You could have a fantastic time, a young single lad on the money they pay you these days. It’s a doddle of a job.”

It was tempting enough for Sean to make a few enquiries. Within a week he had allowed himself to be persuaded to fill in an application form. Before he was fully aware of what was happening to him, Sean was six weeks deep into training and already hating everything about it. Showing aptitude for the work helped mask the mismatch. The first week on the beat, one of his new friends on a patrol in Hendon was set upon by six men wearing masks. While five of them held him down on the floor, the sixth carved up the probationer’s legs with a sixteen-inch machete.

Hard months followed when Sean had to battle with the realisation that he was not cut from the kind of cloth that formed a modern police officer; worse, he didn’t even possess a patch of it. Late-night telephone calls to his friends didn’t help. Sean was told to show some steel, to butch it out. Watching the traffic bristling along Amhurst Park where he rented a top-floor flat, he asked questions of himself that could only ever be answered in the negative. Empty vodka bottles piled up in the kitchen, a crass testament to the masculinity to which he felt unable to lay claim.

Somehow, thanks to discreet sessions with the division psychologist and the jockeying of his new partner, Sally, he was able to find cause for hope. Much of the job was dull but safe. Night shifts, however, would always scour the saliva from his mouth and have him on edge whenever the radio on the dash spat its codes of desperation at him.

“Can we stop?” he asked Sally. “Let’s get some coffee.”

Sally brought the squad car to a halt outside a twenty-four-hour bagel shop. Sean slammed the car door, relishing the cold air as it clouted the smell of the job from him. The windows of the bakery bore diminishing spheres of clarity; mist seeped across the panes like a drawn curtain. He could see vague, pinkish shapes behind a counter, loading bread onto glass shelves, their faces snagging on the smears of mist, pulling them out of true as though their owners had no shape, no substance. It was a mesmerising trick. Sean breathed ghosts through the rain, wondering why it nagged at him so.

Sally’s nails on the windscreen: he turned to see her pulling a face, her tongue wedged between her teeth and lower lip. Come on, she mouthed.

Sean pushed through the door; hot smells – bread, cinnamon and coffee – settled into him. He was thinking about the man at the window, back at the flat. He couldn’t remember his features, what he had looked like. Every time his mind tried to focus on his eyes, or his mouth, they slid away, like a greasy egg introduced too quickly to the plate.

Would you mind opening the front door, please sir?

“Two coffees please, mate. And a couple of those raisin bagels.”

That look. Everyone he talked to or walked past gave him the same look when he was in uniform. What was it? Hatred? Pity? Mistrust?

He took the polystyrene containers and tried to give his best off-duty smile when the shop assistant told him there would be no charge. Outside he stared up at the closed windows of the sleeping street.

Hot coffee raged across his hands where he had crushed the cartons.

Sally, climbing out of the car, concern creasing her face: “Sean?”

“It was him,” he said.

Hours later, at the centre of the clamour, the blue lights and static volleying around the radios in her living room, those three words were all he could say.

CHAPTER TWO: FAIT ACCOMPLI

IT SEEMED PRE-ORDAINED that he should know the victim. Sean sat – the still point at a core of bustle – as forensics sorted through the gimcrackery of her flat. Occasionally they would shoot him an askance look when he picked up some jujube from a table or the floor. One of them, flat-mouthed, pressed a pair of rubber gloves into his hands without a word.

Naomi Clew, twenty-nine; Caucasian; sandy blonde hair; brown eyes. She had been stabbed eighteen times with a Phillips screwdriver; the fatal blow, a neat little puncture to her throat. Her mouth and eyelids had been mutilated. The body hadn’t been moved yet and was cooling on the bed to which she had been tied. The crisp sizzle of Metz flashes exploded there now; Sean watched the occasional flares coat the hallway as the forensics team took their snapshots. She wore a pair of cream Marks and Spencer silk pyjama bottoms, nothing on top but a glaze of blood. Her toenails were painted with chipped purple enamel and a ring encircled the little toe of her right foot. She wore other pieces of jewellery: a plain silver stud through her tongue, a plain silver bracelet, and a leather thong that threaded a small grey pebble around her neck. He found it hard to concentrate on that.

There was also a burn around her throat, a rope burn, inflicted post-mortem.

“What’s the fucking point of that?” Sean asked nobody in particular. “She was fucking dead already. Why strangle a fucking dead girl?”

“Come on, Sean,” said Sally, picking her way through the scrum of uniforms. “Fresh air.”

He let his partner hoist him to his feet and lead him outside. Watery sunlight dribbled across slates glossed by the previous night’s rain. Neighbouring windows were filled with folded arms, nighties and hair in rollers. Vans from BBC, ITN, and Sky were clustered on the allotted parking spaces; sodium light bathed pancake faces with unreal colour as on-the-spot reports were filed. A phalanx of reporters turned Sean’s way. He heard the words: “—officer who made the gaffe…” and then Sally was telling them to piss off while she bundled Sean into the squad car. He covered his face as the photographers blazed away at him and Sally took off through the estate.

“How did they find out so quick?” Sean asked, looking back at the scramble. “How did they find out at all?”

“Find out about what?”

“That I fucked up,” he replied.

“We both fucked up. Don’t worry, we’ll blag it.” Sally drove south through Catford, winding through dead, monotone streets for twenty minutes before parking opposite a pub – The Gnarled Fiddler – on the Bromley Road.

“A snifter is in order,” Sally said. “I’m buying.”

Udney, the landlord of the Fiddler, tossed them some keys from the upstairs window. “Help yourself, Sally, Sean,” he said. “I’m busy stuffing an old bird.”

They entered the pub to the sounds of muffled laughter. It might have been from the ghosts of the previous night’s excesses. Sally moved around to the serving side of the bar, her feet catching in the tacky layers of spilled booze. She poured a pint of Guinness for Sean, loosing too a hefty glug from the Jack Daniel’s optic. She slid the drinks across to her partner.

“What are you drinking?”

“I’m driving, soft lad. It would look great, the two of us suspended on the same day, wouldn’t it?” She poured herself a glass of cola.

“It’s twenty past seven in the morning, Sally. This isn’t healthy.” Sean nevertheless sank a double gulp from his pint and picked up the short, which he swirled between his fingers.

“Healthier than sitting in bed looking like a human colander. Arses skywards, mate.” When she had taken a swig, she saw he was still staring into his glass.

“What?” she said.

Sean downed the spirit and closed his eyes against its heat. “I knew her,” he murmured. “I used to go out with her.”

Sally misread the situation. “The lass upstairs?” she asked. “The one Udney’s up to his nuts in right now?”

Sean held her gaze.

“Oh shit,” Sally said. “I’m sorry.”

“Not half as much as I am.”

They contemplated their glasses until they were empty, and Sean watched as Sally refilled them.

“What will you do? Will you tell Rachel?”

“I don’t know what I’ll tell Rachel. I don’t even know how I should look at Rachel these days.” He sighed and took another long drink of his pint. It was making him feel better and he felt sick for that. “I’m finished.”

“No you’re not,” Sally urged, reaching out to grasp his arm. “I told you, we can work this out.”

“I don’t want it worked out. Sally, this is just the first of a long line of cock-ups if I don’t get lost now. I’m not happy with the job—”

“But you’re a good copper.”

“No, I’m not. I’m not happy. And if you’re not happy, if your heart isn’t in the work then your head isn’t in it either. That’s when mistakes happen. I should have done more. I should have asked that bastard who he was and then got him to prove who he was. I should have asked to see the woman who lived in the flat.”

Sally shook her head. “Hey, I didn’t ask either. That puts me in the same shit-sack as you.”

Sean aped her movements. “All that proves is I’m a bad influence. You need a new partner.”

“Like I need a third eye,” she spat. “We work well together.”

“That’s just it, Sally,” Sean said, so gently that she had to lean in to catch it. “I’m not working.”

HE GOT BACK to his flat at noon, already suffering from a hangover. Looking out of his bedroom window at north London’s sprawl, hangdog and feverish beneath a caul of drizzle, he drank a mug of tea and listened to his telephone messages. Rachel had left two, despite knowing which shift he was working and the number of the station where he could be contacted. She wanted to know what he was going to do. The first message was stiff and demanding, the second weepily imploring. It summed her up, these Janus calls. He had never known anybody with such a volatile personality; it was as if in her thirty years she had been unable to nail down the person she believed she was, as if – even now – she were still riffling her own character deck in an attempt to pick out the right Rachel card.

The substance of her entreaties to him, no matter the emotions in which they were couched, remained the same. An ultimatum: move in with her or it was over. He replayed, through the steam of his tea, some of the countless arguments and discussions they had conducted, trying to thrash out what was, it now seemed, an insoluble problem. In none of them had the suggestion been made that they were fundamentally ill-matched. On virtually every front – bar sex – their needs clashed. And because everything else refused to gel, so their physical compatibility had been the unifying element to go first. Now it was transparent that there was nothing holding them together and they were both confused, still making attempts to solidify something that had no base upon which to build.

“I want children.” Her voice, reedy and distant on the tape, as though coming at him from another world, another time. “I want us to work.”

Naomi sitting on the crossbar of a bike he’s trying to steer, dropping a sticky strawberry kiss on his mouth. She’s squinting into the sun. Her voice belongs to someone much older. Does it matter if I’m ten if I love you? Does it mean anything less?

CHAPTER THREE: BLUE ZONES

WHAT A DAY. Sean knew things were likely to happen that would change his life, but prior knowledge had not served him with the tools to deal with them. He had woken before six and for a lunatic moment he thought he was back home in Warrington, his mum pottering around in the kitchen preparing sandwiches for his dad before he went out to work. But the potterer – too loud, obviously designed to wake him – was Rachel. He had given up on his original plan of writing to her and caught a cab over. The weather had worsened during the night as they talked and by two a.m. gales were battering the house. Inside too, Sean had thought, as he watched Rachel fighting inner storms. He wondered which of her numerous personae might reveal itself to him and had prepared for the most vicious. But when she spoke, it was clear that any fury she might have been cultivating had grounded itself on the rocks of his logic. They finished the night promising to rebuild the friendship that had existed before they became lovers. Her invitation to stay had clearly run its course however, and Sean had dressed hurriedly, hoping the previous night’s reason hadn’t festered, become a final, sour rebuke to spoil things. But they had swapped civil goodbyes, had even managed a hug and a brief kiss.

Now, three hours later, he was sitting on a Lewisham wall, her perfume lingering on his jumper, the memory of her breasts pressing against him for the final time a painful ache in too many places across his body.

Dealing with the inspector overseeing his shift – a gruff but affable old bobby called Rostron with a dreary penchant for the old ways of the Force – had been a relative pleasure.

He had expected a carpeting but Rostron had been accommodating, although he was clearly of the misplaced opinion that Sean was an ambitious constable worried about his future. When Sean’s intentions were made clear, Rostron seemed to shrink, sadly accusing Sean of failure before any real effort had been made to improve his career prospects.

“You’re giving in at the first hurdle,” Rostron had said, pacing his office. “You’re wasting real potential.”

“This is not for me,” Sean had replied. “I’m a coward. You know, even if I had gone to that flat knowing there was a killer inside, I still would have wimped out of it.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Rostron had countered, anger hatching in his voice. “That’s not the voice of a policeman talking.”

“That’s right,” Sean had said, trying to keep traces of facetiousness out of his voice. Rostron wasn’t a bad man. “I’m not a policeman.”

Tired, emotionally hollowed, he managed a small wave and a smile for Sally as she pulled up in her Ford Focus. She was dressed in a grey baggy sweat shirt and jogging pants; he couldn’t think of an off-duty time when he had seen her in anything but.

“Are you really going to do this?” she asked, as he slid into the passenger seat.

“Yes,” Sean replied, not knowing to which of his decisions she was referring. What pleased him was the knowledge that any of them could be answered in the affirmative. For a change he was doing something positive. Acting for himself.

“What if someone recognises you?”

She was talking about the funeral. The newspapers had given it a discreet mention, in contrast to the screamers that dealt with the murder itself on the front pages.

“I’m not going in,” he emphasised. “I’m just going to wait outside the church in the car for a little while. Pay my respects. You know.”

“But her parents,” Sally persisted. “They’ll remember you.”

Through the grimy window Sean thought of a couple eating breakfast on a patio overlooking a distant beach. A dog running through the dunes disrupting clumsy kisses that tasted of apple-flavoured bubblegum, under blankets that smelled of toast.

“That was years ago,” he muttered. “I doubt they’re still alive. They were old even then.”

They drove in silence until they reached Lewisham train station. Sean could have walked or jumped on a bus but Sally was adamant she would drop him off. They both knew what was happening.

“What will you do?”

It was one of the little things about Sally that he would miss, the ambiguous questions. He wondered briefly if it was a trick she had learned in training, a gimmick that might draw some intelligence from a suspect that might not have otherwise been forthcoming. He hoped that wasn’t the case, that it was a fluke in her make-up, like the way she mixed Sea Breeze cocktails or her habit of singing Sex Pistols songs when chasing a stolen car.

She was staring straight ahead at the buses growling and grinding around the terminus. From the train station beyond, a clipped PA announcement was borne down to them on a gust. Something about a diversion. Something else about Cannon Street.

“Work it out,” he said. “Work Naomi out. It’s been such a long time since I saw her last. I could barely recognise her. She looked so… womanly.”

Sally laughed, despite the gravity pulling Sean’s voice down.

“Sorry,” she said. “But maybe you’re right. You’re much too soft for us lot. Get on and be a poet or something. Grow your hair.”

“I’ll keep in touch,” he said, leaning over and kissing her cheek, a gesture that mildly surprised them both. “Sorry it didn’t work out.”

“If my new partner’s a spanner,” she warned, “I’ll send you a phone call so vicious you’ll need to wear armour to deal with it.”

He waved as she drove away, and she was shouting: “Be a dandy, a folk singer. Be a beautician! You northern ponce, you!”

HE SAT IN the car for five minutes before realising he had to get closer to her.

Wishing he had dressed in something more befitting the occasion than a jumper and jeans, Sean stepped through the kissing gate in the church wall and followed a narrow gravel path around the side of the tiny stone building. Tensing himself against a sight he knew he had seen in countless films and three or four times in the course of his work, Sean peered into the graveyard, feeling the weight of grief coming off the stones like something palpable, like heat. Around two dozen mourners had turned out to see Naomi buried. Already they were positioned around the grave: four of them facing Sean, the rest in various degrees of profile or with their backs to him. He moved off the gravel path and pushed through the willows to a spot where he could hear the occasional comforting phrase from the priest. Severed or faded names emerged from moss as he padded through the stones, together with dates and touching, if clichéd, couplets. He tried to maintain his focus on the group in front of him – and keep himself hidden – but the ancient call of the stones was too great. He gradually became aware of two things: that there were a couple of other attendants to the funeral, as furtive as he; and that he was being watched.

Had he not left the path when he did, the two men would have seen him. They had followed his route along the path and were now standing twenty feet away from Sean, on the spot he had just vacated. An instinct told him to be grateful for this. One of them was fiftyish, with talcum-white hair en brosse. His eyebrows and moustache were dark flat thickets; Sean could not see the eyes they protected. He stood like a suited barrel, hands in front of him, occasionally rubbing his chin against the knot of his tie. His companion was younger and more relaxed. His suit did not fit, and Sean could see the body beneath it labouring to catch breath. His face was scrubbed and scraped pink; his hair was like candyfloss, his eyes owlish and sore-looking.

A gritting sound: the lowering of the coffin. Sean watched as Naomi disappeared by degrees. The slow burn of self-hatred he had felt since the day of his blunder flared. It mattered not one bit that the pathologist’s report indicated she had been dead long before he and Sally arrived on the scene. He felt responsible. As he pickled in these sour juices, he saw someone, not ten feet away on the other side of the fence, watching him from the leading edge of a field of towering grass.

She was a small girl with long brown hair, clutching a perished sponge doll whose supportive wires were exposed in several places. The girl’s dress was a thin affair of plain sky-blue material. He could see her vested body through it. Her dark eyes watched him – not without humour – as he hunched in the protection of the trees. His main concern was that she would expose him, either to the mourners, or to the men standing to his right. But gradually her stare seemed to solidify in the brittle morning air, impaling him with something warm and comforting, so that presently he felt as though he and the girl were the only living creatures in miles.

She didn’t appear shy at all, nor was she intimidated by the location or his posture of stealth. She made no attempt to communicate with him, other than to give him a gap-filled smile. She anticipated his shooing gesture by a second, turning and barging into the shield of grass quickly enough to have him wondering if he had imagined her. But no, the shimmer of grass betrayed the course of her movements. He watched her progress until, unexpectedly, the shiver of grass ceased when she must have been only a third of the way across the field.

His concern for her safety was negated by the eerie certainty of his instinct that, should he plough after her, he would not find her. Irritated by the distraction, he returned his attention to the funeral, but the black suits were drifting away from the graveside like scraps of incinerated paper. A simple goodbye he had sought, but he had failed even in this, looking instead for intrigue in the irrelevances that surrounded him. Plodding back to his car, careful not to give away his position to the two stragglers with whom he had observed the service, Sean presumed that he was subconsciously reluctant to give up the police part of his brain – such as it was. From the sanctity of the driver’s seat he watched the slow dispersal of the mourners, recognising Naomi’s father as he did so. He had changed only marginally in the fifteen years since they had last met. Perhaps he was a little thicker around the middle; there was a deeper smattering of grey in the oiled black hair; there was sadness and fatigue in the eyes. Age and shock were pulling his body south.

Sean caught a glimpse of his own face in the rear-view mirror but shied from its scrutiny. In the wake of Naomi’s death and the acknowledgement of his own failures, he didn’t want the awareness of his own mortality to compound his misery.

He gunned the engine as the two men brought up the rear. They were relaxed, alert, like presidential bodyguards. Sean found first gear and moved sedately away, wondering why his heart beat so violently, why his head pounded with frustrated questions.

ON THE TRAIN north, he tried to read the biography of an actor whose films he admired but he couldn’t give his mind to the words when Naomi kept dancing at its fringes. He pushed his focus beyond the filth on the window into fields wadded with mist. Low sunlight picked out the uncertain shapes of farmhouses; a man with a stick; a wheelbarrow. Hedgerows were blistered with newish berries. A series of narrow lanes striped the land for miles.

He tried to remember the last time he had ventured north but only the memory of his leaving it emerged. London was all he seemed to have known. The images of a bleak, rainy motorway and a series of New Order cassettes; appalling sandwiches (or “sadwiches” as Rachel referred to service station food), and the dead grind of traffic made him grateful for this trip now.

The train slowed noticeably. Presently the driver made an announcement that they were approaching Warrington Bank Quay. Sean collected his things and shuffled down the aisle to the doors. Through the window, the platform shuttled into view. The blur of faces waiting to board bothered him by their lack of features – lost to the train’s speed. Just before the brakes bit harder and he was able to define individuals, the grinning face of the child he had seen in the cemetery sprang out at him: a surprise in a pop-up book. He craned his neck to keep her in his view but she was lost to the passengers as they jostled for position in front of the doors. Once the train was at a standstill and the security locks were released, Sean hopped onto the platform and hurried back towards the lead section of the station. Through the criss-cross of bodies he saw a whip of long brown hair as she ducked down the exit steps. He followed as quickly as the crowds allowed him but knew as he reached the ticket barrier that she had given him the slip.

CHAPTER FOUR: RENTED ACCOMMODATION

EARLY NEXT MORNING, after a night spent in the hotel across the road from the train station, he rented a car, a blue Rover 25, rang a few of the landlords advertising bedsits in the local newspaper, and moved his meagre possessions into a furnished studio flat above a greengrocer on Ripley Street, overlooking the car park of the general hospital on one side and the railway on the other.

He chivvied himself along with thoughts of how much such a chicken coop would fetch in London, and without a view anywhere near as attractive. He spent the afternoon in town, buying groceries and items he felt he would need for the bedsit: a desk which he arranged to have delivered that evening, a table lamp, a couple of litres of white paint, and a paint roller. Once or twice during his shopping trip, he looked up from the languid scrum at the market stalls, certain that there would be someone looking directly at him. He wondered if he would see the little girl again, but although there were plenty of youngsters out shopping with their parents, none of them resembled her.

He lugged his purchases back to the car and locked them in the boot. The thought of returning to the flat and arranging everything, stamping his authority on the place, was attractive, but he felt the compulsion to slow down. If he was going to fit in here, he needed to slough his London skin. Warrington wouldn’t require the same thrust that the capital demanded of him. There was no rush in which to become embroiled.

The decision made, he sauntered across the road to a pub free of misspelled chalked menus and entreaties to attend karaoke night. He took his pint to a window seat and let the lethargy of a Tuesday afternoon seep into him.

Time became some great warm blanket that he was trying to unfold, but that showed no signs of ever being fully spread. Pleased with the beer, he had another half, read the newspaper, and struck up a conversation with an old-timer who had a plaque above his stool at the bar which read David’s Seat. He even flirted mildly with a good-natured barmaid, who possessed none of the contemptuous dismissiveness of some of her southern counterparts.

Readying himself to leave, he heard one glottal moment from the adjoining pool room: Clew.

An arch provided the entrance to the pool room on the far side of the pub. It framed part of the table with its blue baize and cones of dusty yellow light. Two pairs of legs stretched out, one ending in a pair of plaster-spattered trainers, the other in soft, black leather boots.

There was a cigarette machine by the arch; although Sean didn’t smoke he pulled out a handful of change and walked over. Feeding coins into the slot, he chanced a look into the pool room. The men were on their own, leaning back on short stools, shrouded by the shadows. One of them, the man wearing the boots, was more animated than the other, who was a motionless mass of black.

Sean hurriedly returned to his car and parked across the street from the pub. Clew he had heard. He wouldn’t listen to the rational voice that told him he had misheard “clue”, or “cue”, or “I’m having a Strongbow, how about you?”. And what if he hadn’t? What if they were having a conversation about Naomi Clew, the poor woman who had lost her life thanks to the sterling work of the Met? So what? It had been all over the papers.

Sean recognised the shoes as they left the pub. The man with the boots was as animated as before, hastily gabbling to his unruffled friend, hands fluttering around his head like duelling birds. Sean recognised him as the young man with the candyfloss hair from the funeral. The other man was wrapped in expensive black: cargo trousers, a cashmere polo neck and a nubuck leather jacket. He wore a trimmed beard and little round frameless sunglasses. He wasn’t saying much, just nodding occasionally. As they parted, he laid a hand on the shoulder of his agitated colleague. Then he stepped into a night-black Shogun and roared away.

The other man, now getting into a battered white van with the words LORD DEMOLITION on the side, Sean followed. The O in LORD was a wrecking ball swinging into action. As they drove through town and into the countryside, Sean tried to convince himself that he should try to forget what had happened to Naomi. There were other, better men processing evidence and sniffing out her killer. It was half a lifetime away. Big distances. Wasn’t it enough that he was here in their home town?

The van took a succession of turns onto lesser roads until tarmac was replaced by dirt tracks. Five miles away from the town, Sean hung back as far as possible, without losing sight of his quarry, not wanting to give his ambition away. Still, he was considering a return to Warrington, worried that his pursuit would be spotted before long. There was nothing out here to offer an excuse behind which to hide. No post office or pub he could claim a visit to.

The van slowed and turned onto a lane that fed a driveway to a tired old farmhouse. Sean parked quickly and picked a parallel route through a ploughed field, his eyes never leaving the van as it pulled up outside the front door. The engine died; the driver got out. A figure appeared in one of the upstairs windows, emerging out of the net curtains like a face in a bad dream. Hunkering down by a frozen jut of earth, Sean watched as a bunch of keys was tossed to the driver. Once he was alone, Sean scooted up the side of the house, cursing as he tripped and slid over the solid ribs of earth pushing up through the frost.

“You wanted out of this job, dickbrains,” he muttered, as he hit shadow to the south side of the house and clung to the brickwork. “You stupid, stupid tit. Go home. Go on. Go home now.”

White pinned down the land for miles around. A distant line of trees looked like stubble on a corpse’s face. Sean had to stop for a moment to gulp down air and try not to let the space tear him away from his position. Ten years in London had failed to inure him to the vertiginous sprawls that existed beyond the city. For a moment, he was terrified by the lack of motion, the conviction that nothing around him had altered in a thousand years and that, if he didn’t move soon, he would be fixed in the scenery for another thousand. He felt vulnerable, exposed, targeted. Vomit charged his clenched teeth and he let it come, as quietly as possible. Darkness crowded him, the sun blotted. Let it be a cloud, he hoped, rising in expectation of some grim-faced, leather-clad ape ready to beat him senseless. But the eclipse had been imagined. Pale sunshine bleached the sky, turning it into a reflection of his surroundings. Getting a grip of himself, he moved towards the rear of the house, scanning for windows all the while. Of those he saw, only one – high up – was without a curtain blocking the view. He tried the back door. Locked. What was he going to do if it was open?

They were talking about the dreadful murder of a local girl. That’s all.

And yet, and yet…

Sean retreated, wondering why his suspicions were so high. Could it just be guilt that was driving him to such extreme behaviour? Was he so desperate to atone for his mistake in London that he would follow any lead, no matter how tenuous? If that was the case, he reasoned, trudging back to the car, then he would destroy himself within weeks, or find himself up before the magistrates on a charge of harassment. In the driving seat, Sean was able to relax, away from the panicky reaches of land, and relish the fresh snap of cold air that had locked itself inside with him. He watched the house for a little longer, hopeful that he would witness them dragging a body outside, but nothing so theatrical occurred. Wondering how he might quash the compulsion to act on behalf of a dead woman– the first girl he had kissed–and suspecting that this visit to Warrington had been ill-thought-out, he started the engine and trundled the car down to the main road.

Seconds later, accelerating back towards town, an oncoming car passed him. In the mirror, Sean watched as it turned into the driveway he had just vacated. Pulling over to the side of the road, Sean’s eyes found themselves in the mirror. They were wide and worrisome. Whatever doubts he had had were spirited away as his lungs begged for him to release the hold on his breath.

One of the men he had seen at the funeral. Tough, barrel-shaped bruiser with tufty white hair.

CHAPTER FIVE: GIRL

EARLY MORNING, HIS run took him on a rough circle past the school on Lodge Lane, down to Sankey Valley Park, under Seven Arches and on to the dual carriageway that snaked west, beyond the cooling towers of Fiddler’s Ferry power station and onwards to Liverpool via Widnes and Runcorn.

Sean headed east, back towards town, barely registering the growl of traffic or the slap of his feet on the wet pavement. The night before, he had returned to the farmhouse and hung around as night gathered and the temperature plummeted. Towards midnight, Barrel-chest and the driver Sean had followed left in the white van. Sean took after them, certain he was solidifying from the cold, his hands and feet sluggish on the controls of the car, his mouth a blue-grey slit that flashed itself to him in the rear-view mirror as streetlamps swung by.

They had pulled up outside a disused ironmonger’s shop. The shredded awning bore the name BOUGHEY’S. He watched the barrel-chested man get out of the van and wave to the driver. Words followed him through the door: “See you tomorrow, Salty.”

So. He had a name. He had an address. He did not yet have a reason. He had reason for few things. Bitterly, Sean had turned the car back towards Ripley Street, quelling the urge to follow the white van on another journey. White van, he felt, played penny whistle to Salty’s big fat tuba.

Now, Sean pulled the hood of his track suit over his head and jogged backstreets, angling towards that ironmonger’s once more. He was almost distracted by some of the memories that leapt up at him; every corner rounded was another half-turn on an unseen winch hauling him back through time.

Here, in the maze of ginnels that was the Wellfield Road estate, were the paths that he had haunted at fifteen with his best friend Glenn and their girlfriends, Sarah and Julie. A concrete cylinder – a pathetic, token toy for the local kids – partially submerged in a square surrounded by fences and front porches, had been a respite in the winter, when walking the frozen streets was too painful. It was still there, along with the soot stains from candles and the scratched names, overlapping across the years to form a tangle of self-affirmation. Sarah’s old house was boarded up now, its highest windows cracked and starred. They had spent innocent evenings in the kitchen, drinking tea and listening to the radio while her mother made strategic checks on them, designed to spoil any moves he made on her.

Sean pushed himself along the canal bank that backed onto the estate, wondering where she was now. What happened to all those people with whom he had been to school? Were they as detached as him, dislocated, wheeling around for something solid on which to latch? Or, as he suspected, had they sussed it all out? If they were happy, well, good luck to them.

The hunched cluster of buildings that housed the ironmonger’s emerged from the bushes and trees lining the bank to his right. Sean arrowed up the bank and silently vaulted the fencing, dropping into a slush of remarkable litter. Among the drifts of dead food cartons and drinks cans there were bruised tailors’ dummies, shattered television sets and small forests of cat furniture wrapped in corduroy and sisal. Sean picked his way through the mess, counting houses until he hit the ironmonger’s. A high wall and a pair of tough wooden gates blocked off his view to the rear of the building, all of it topped off with coils of razor wire. A peek through the slats awarded him a view of a thick sheaf of tall weeds and a rusting bath leaning against a skip. All of the windows were frosted and blackness piled against them from within.

Sean tried the gates. They shifted under the sawing action of his arm but did not give. He had instead seen how he might climb over without harming himself when he heard a brief, human bark of panic somewhere behind him.

He clung to the gate, head twisted, frozen as he searched the cavernous ruin of what must once have been a car park. Heavy trees with discoloured leaves lurched into one another, creating a knit of confusion he could barely see into. The tarmac they grew out of was as warped as the sway and twist of their branches.

Very clearly, he heard: “Keep fucking still, bitch, or I’ll cut you.”

The words rushed out of the dark. Sean stood quietly for a moment, eyes closed, letting the sounds come into him. His heart was a cold, measured echo, somewhere too deep inside him. He was not afraid.

“Suck it, bitch,” he heard. “Oh no? Okay, then. Mac, cut her tit off.”

Sean moved.

He pelted into the clotted darkness, freeing his sweatshirt from the waistband of his track suit bottoms so that he could get at his knife. A woman was mewling under the thrash of bushes. “Stop it… please… stop it.”

There were two men crouched over her, their black jackets shining dully as they dipped in and out of the protection of a weeping willow. One of them had his trousers around his ankles. Sean veered towards him, his steps disguised by the din of their violence. Lashing out a foot, he caught the first man across the top of his thigh; he went down heavily, a yell cutting off the sobs of the woman pinned beneath them. Before the other could bring himself upright, Sean flashed his arm out and cut him across the bridge of his nose. Blood sprayed from between his fingers as he dropped to his knees.

“Come on,” he said, reaching down to the girl. Her skirt was piled up around her hips and her blouse was torn open. She drew the two halves of it together as she surfaced from the gloom, her eyes like silver bubbles moving through dark water. Wet soil was caked onto half of her head; blood formed a thin lather over the other. She resembled some grim harlequin. She took his hand and he pulled her towards him, and asked if she was badly injured.

“I’m okay,” she told him. “They didn’t stab me.”

She wrenched herself free and knelt down by the man whose face was trying to pour out all over the grass. Her hands jabbed into his pockets; she flashed Sean a smile as she emerged with a wad of cash.

“Twat,” said the other man, struggling to pull his pants up.

“I said come on,” Sean urged. The girl went to him and they backed away. Sean’s knife was raised now, pinning the man called Mac to the darkness. “I will use this, if you follow,” he said, levelly. “And I’m good with it.”

Mac spat at him.

“Yeah, sure,” he said and lunged. Sean stepped inside his outstretched arms and almost delicately carved a broad slice out of his leg. Mac dropped, clutching his thigh. Blood squirted from between his fingers. He looked up at Sean with an expression almost of hope. He seemed too shocked to make any noise at all.

By the time Sean had returned to the main road, the girl was making her way to the opposite path. He followed, stabbing a bloody finger over the keypad of his mobile, relaying his alert to the police switchboard; a nasal voice asked for his name, address and the location of crime. He lied about everything bar the site.

“No, it’s this way,” Sean called out, as the girl made to cut down an alleyway to more estate blocks. The area was crawling with them: drab grey monoliths, punch-drunk and lifeless, their tiny windows either smashed in or boarded over. She stopped and looked back at him, her hip knocked out to one side as she flipped him the Vs.

“What’s this way?” she asked. She was smiling at him. Kind of.

“My place. I’ve got some food. A hot bath. You can stay with me.”

“Oh can I? I’ve just pocketed me the best part of two hundred quid, Tarzan. I could stay in God’s penthouse if I wanted.”

“God doesn’t do rescues.”

“Oh really?” she sang. “What are you, my guardian angel?”

“Stay with me. It’s not safe around here. You might get attacked again.”

Somebody swore in the hive of dwellings behind them. Glass shattered.

“Place has changed since I was a kid,” he said. “Used to be you could leave your front door open and get back to find the place completely fucked over. Now though, they fuck your place over and sit around waiting for you to get back so that they can fuck you over too.”

“Fool with me, Tarzan,” she snarled, falling into step with him, “and I’ll use that knife of yours on your balls.”

CHAPTER SIX: ARRIVAL

ONE MOMENT SHE had been heating a tin of Heinz vegetable soup on the cooker, the next she was a whining heap on the floor.

Will had been thinking of when they first met. How her hair had glowed in the sunshine as she stepped from the library into his path. Following her, and berating himself for his foolishness as he did so, he’d tried to picture her face – of which he’d only caught a glimpse as she brushed by him. The black jacket she wore only served as a backdrop for the red that tumbled down it. When she reached her lift and caught him standing awkwardly, library book clasped to his chest, he asked if he might buy her a drink, fully expecting her to tell him to piss off. She did tell him to piss off. But she had kissed him too. Things had gone well. She had become his new direction. He’d suspected that a wasted life spent shoplifting and fighting and making cameos in any or all of the local courts might be over. Things had gone so well that here he was now, two years later, looking down at his heavily pregnant, heavily sweating wife as a pool of soup spread beneath her.

“Ambulance, Will,” she gasped as he tried to pick her up but she was fish slippery, her body so completely sheened she might have just stepped out of the shower. Her thick red hair had become dark and limp at the ends where it was plastered to her forehead and shoulders.

“Now?” he asked, incredulous. “But the doctor said—”

“Fuck the fucking doctor, Will. Fucking now.”

He lunged for the door, so shocked by her outburst he began to laugh. He tried not to look at her fingers as he spoke to the bland, professional voices – they’d become claws trying to gain purchase on the kitchen floor. Her face had gone horribly white with pain; her hair seemed to be leaking blood into her skin.

The first scream had him down on his knees beside her, pathetically trying to get her to breathe properly. He kept thinking of clean towels and hot water, not having a clue what to do with them. He thought the pounding was their baby trying to barge its way out but then he realised someone was at the door. He went to unlock it, grateful the ambulance crew had taken so little time but wondering why they’d come to the rear of the flat. It was Mrs Garraway, from next door.

“Out of the way, Will,” she squawked, pecking her tiny head in front of his. “You’ve phoned for an ambulance, no doubt. I should wait by the front door.”

Yes, he thought, as she began tending to his wife, loosening her blouse and the drawstring of her leggings, you fucking well should. Catriona was all clenched teeth and eyes – he hoped it wasn’t all due to the trauma of birth; that she was as peeved with Mrs Garraway’s appearance as he.

“How did you—” he began.

“I’m not thick, son,” she admonished, throwing him a withering look with those pale eyes of hers. “I know a birthing cry when I hear one. Now off with you. Call me when the cavalry arrive.”

Once out of the kitchenette and into the dim warmth of their living room, he began to shake, or at least notice he was shaking. Catriona’s copy of TV Quick lay open on the couch where she’d been sitting not ten minutes ago. They’d decided to watch a Daniel Craig film that evening; it would be starting soon.

He squinted into the street, astonished by the lack of warning. Was it always this way? Oughtn’t there be signs – contractions and the like? Those of his friends and family who had children had never described an incident resembling this. So did that mean something was wrong? Pincers tightened inside him. Mrs Garraway didn’t give the impression that anything was amiss but maybe she was hiding her concern so as not to panic him. He willed the sirens to sound and searched the sky for flashes of blue, trying to ignore the hollowing of his guts. Another scream drew blood from his tongue as he bit it; it should be him with her, not Mrs Garraway, yet he held back, afraid he wouldn’t hear the ambulance above his wife’s pain or the clamour of his heart should he return to the kitchen. As if suspecting his dilemma, Mrs Garraway called for him to stay put; she was in control, though her voice suggested otherwise.

He forced himself to resist anxiety and opened the door to the cool air. As much as he strained, he couldn’t hear a siren. Why tonight? he thought, cursing the thrum of traffic. Another cry pierced him. He must have been ready to faint for it appeared that great streamers of the night were sailing past him, destined for Catriona’s lungs as she sucked in the fuel for a scream that he was dreading. It wouldn’t sound of anything, that scream. The dying never scream. He heard Mrs Garraway moan, “Jesus Christ!” He fell against the door and a sheet of pain wrapped around his ribs; it cleared his head. Mrs Garraway’s face floated in front of his, twisted with grief and revulsion.

“Catriona,” he mumbled, searching to give muscle to his voice.

“She’s all right, Will. She’s okay.”

His relief was momentary. A skin of panic stuck his tongue to his palate. “The baby—” But his voice was a whisper. He looked past her to the kitchen door, which was barely open, offering a sliver of a view. The floor was awash with red. “The baby,” he wailed at last. Was that a towel there, that red heap? But it was moving, it was moving very slightly.

Mrs Garraway was shaking her head and crying. “The baby—”

“The baby what? The baby fucking what?” But he was pushing her aside. If it was moving, it must mean the child was alive. She said something else but he thought he must have heard wrong; she couldn’t have said that. At the kitchen door though, he saw she was right. Catriona was unconscious but breathing regularly, a peaceful look on her face. For him to scream now might wake her and he didn’t want to do that, not when it would mean she’d see that the baby had been born inside out.

KERWICK SAID, “I love this job.”

“What’s to love, for Christ’s sake?” Trantam leaned into the bend as he steered the Merc left. “And where, for the love of minge, are we?”

A voice from the back seat said: “Saddle up those sirens, children.” Out of the shadow, a head emerged, along with two huge, gloved hands that grasped the front seats. Black collars jutted into the grooves of a face so thin it seemed it must collapse in on itself.

“And can we have flashing lights too, Gleave?” sang Kerwick, clapping his hands. “Can we? Can we?”

“Nipple,” spat Trantam, but he was smiling. He turned to Gleave. “What’s happened?”

Traffic fell away from them as the Merc wailed and strobed through the north London streets. Gleave said, “We have to make a special pick-up. Same kind of shit we usually do, but we’re using a different hand to wipe the mess up with.” Gleave flexed his fingers; his directions were accompanied by the squeal of leather. “We’re on Pandora now. Hang a left into Narcissus. Top of the road, right into Mill Lane. West End Lane is straight ahead.”

Trantam braked hard outside Cumberland Mansions. The three men got out of the car. Gleave rang the bell. A few seconds later, a frantic voice yammered down at them about ambulances and police.

“That’s right, sir,” said Gleave firmly. “We’re from the hospital. Could you let us in, please?”

As the buzzer released the door, Gleave leaned against Trantam as Kerwick disappeared up the stairwell. “There are five flats in this block. Shoot anything that breathes. Shoot anything that doesn’t.”

WILL GOT SO far as to ask where the stretcher was before a great bright flare went off in his head. It took a while to blink it free and when he could see again, he was sitting in a puddle of his own piss on the floor, looking into the silenced muzzle of a gun.

“Congratulations! It’s a… it’s a… sheesh! What is it? Dog food?” Kerwick was pumped, jittery as a candle’s flame. Will saw, through the gap at the kitchen door, his wife being moved. She moved very easily on her slick of blood. He thought, hoped, he heard her moan.

Mrs Garraway was lolling over an arm of the sofa. Someone had used the philtrum between her nose and mouth for target practice. Splinters from her dentures had become embedded in her cheeks on their way out; it seemed as though she was eating herself from within.

“What did she do?” Will asked, his voice thick and sleepy with fear.

Kerwick snorted. “She died, brainiac. Jesus.”

Gleave appeared behind Kerwick, drifting from the kitchen. He didn’t look up as he passed them and stepped into the bathroom. “The mother’s dying. We have to be quick. Kill him and then we have to go,” he said. He turned to Will and smiled. It was almost compassionate, if you could get beyond the wolfish, densely packed teeth and the lack of animation in the eyes. “Godspeed, you nobody cunt,” he said.

CHEKE SPAT TWICE and waited for her eyes to clear. Mucus filled her nose and throat, and burbled wetly in the creaking cavities of her chest. Beyond the blurred limit of her vision, shapes rocked and nodded like restless trees viewed at dark. There were voices too, although she could not yet decode their patterns. It was a painful time and one best suited to introversion. She was barely conversant with the skill of torpor but tried to retreat into it now, seeking shelter in which she could rejuvenate herself at her own pace. The journey had been a shock, both physically and mentally. She wasn’t sure if she had escaped serious injury. She needed torpor to give her time for reflection as well as the chance to heal any injuries.

But they wouldn’t give her the chance. Again the needle sought her armpit, again the injection flooded her with bitter blue panic, the electric juice they’d pumped her with flirting with heart and brain as though it might violently dissolve them like sodium in water.

She flailed backwards, tipping up over an obstacle, landing heavily on her backside.

“What do you want?” she asked, but it came out all wrong, her lips failing to coalesce around the words as she uttered them. Another glut of sputum loosed itself from her lungs. She did not feel good. Someone must have understood her question however, for:

“We need you to find someone. We need you to end someone’s life for us. It’s a job beyond me or my men.”

The light bleeding into her eyes was less painful now, allowing her to make out a tall figure in a black coat, the lapels of which were raised high to his cheekbones. His eyes were hard and grey but surrounded with creases and crinkles that softened him, gave him an avuncular air. “My name is Gleave, by the way. Daniel Gleave. I was sent by friends to collect you.”

Cheke spat again and shivered. She was covered in thin, greyish slime. It was matted in her hair and she could feel it leaking from between her legs. Her brain had no concept of what had gone before a few minutes ago; her earliest memory, it seemed, was of the trauma-thrill of bright light scouring her head and the subsequent creep of form as she perceived figures through foggy, untrained eyes. The fugue that prevented her from dipping beneath the barrier to her memory was not so solid that it had severed her links with any of her abilities. She was, after all, recalling the benefits of torpor. She felt the instinct of attack swooning through her.

The man, Gleave, approached her, and curled a blanket around her shoulders. “I’m sorry for the haste,” he said, in a voice bound up with smells she could not place but which were of comfort to her. “It must have been a shock to the system, to say the least. But we are in great danger and we need your help. There have been unforeseen developments in spheres we thought were long extinct.”

Another voice, clipped, withering, in the background: “Unforeseen by some of us, Gleave. Not all.”

Gleave held the blanket tightly around her and ignored the interruption. She was able to focus on his nails as his fingers made shallow dents in the fabric. Neatly cut nails, with a milky white cuticle, a dull sheen. She felt his fingers warming her skin, little pads of energy. Her pores opened and gulped his proximity, starved for the nourishment that she required to function.

“I need to feed,” she managed, and the man nodded.

“I know.”

He led her through a door into a corridor flanked with plants bearing heavy, waxy leaves. A man’s voice said: “Who the fuck is she?”

“Where is this?” she asked, her voice growing stronger all the time. Her eyes were pulling in shapes much faster now, although their edges bled colour into the air, making everything seem dreamlike and unreal.

“You don’t need to know that just yet,” he soothed. “We’ll get you somewhere safe and then you can rest. You’ve made quite a journey. We don’t want you spoilt in any way.”

The floor they walked on was flooded with soft, red carpet; she couldn’t see her bare feet land, it was so deep. She could smell something rich and dense that made her stomach churn with desire. The man’s hand was gentle but steady upon her arm, staying her, and she fought with the desire to sap him. It would appear that any allies would be hard to find. She didn’t want to alienate the first person to help her.

Up ahead, a door gave on to a room awash with blood. Her mouth filled with drool.

“She’s fresh,” said Gleave. “She helped bring you to us.”

Cheke moved away from him. Her eyes much more comfortable in the false night of the room, she was able to see the woman immediately, slumped in her own juices, moaning, flapping a hand.

Cheke didn’t make a sound as she surged over the dying woman, wrapping her up in a seamless embrace. Her eyes flickered spastically in closing, a reflex of pleasure as she felt the flesh beneath her succumb to the grateful opening of her mouths.

WILL RAN.

The fire escape held him well enough, but he wasn’t sure that his sanity would follow suit. He had kicked out at the hand holding the gun when Trantam was rubbernecking the freak that had come tottering out of his bathroom. Catriona was dead or as near as damn it. He knew that, and the knowledge helped him run faster. If he was to go back he would be dead too, and how would that have made Cat feel? He tore along streets that now possessed a comic familiarity. Usually he would pad back along this lane with the Sunday papers, or cut down this alleyway on his way back from O’Henery’s pub, kicking a can against the wall. Now he scarred these roads of his with fear. He’d not be able to retrace his route in the future without a bad taste in his mouth.

He chanced a look over his shoulder as he fled down Finchley Road, but nothing was coming his way. Traffic was a still concertina, cars aiming for the motorway or fruitlessly attempting to nose south towards the auto graveyard that the city centre had become. Cursing the fact that he didn’t have his mobile on him, and the lack of a police presence in an area usually teeming with them, he jogged to a phone box whose guts had been ripped out. His eyes followed the broken obliques of rain on the glass, splintering the coming and going of white and red lights. He wondered if this numbness was a part of shock; he had never in his life suffered a traumatic moment. No broken bones. His grandparents dead long before he was even aware of what death meant. No operations, no burns, no car accidents…

He tried the phone even though he knew it couldn’t work. He was sitting on the floor of the kiosk, snot and tears dribbling into his mouth as quickly as he could lick them away. He raised his face to a boy in a school uniform slowly obscuring the glass space between them with a can of spray paint. The boy was looking down at him and shaking his head.

MOTION. CHEKE FELT it rolling through her, under her. Warmth seeping into her. She sat next to Gleave who looked dead and grey, flickering in and out of the light that pulsed at the windows. She felt the anger drift off him in similar waves. One eye was lost to a slice of shadow; the other stared flatly at the back of Trantam’s head. She had flinched before the stinging rebuke Trantam had received.

Cheke shifted in her seat, moving against Gleave, and was glad for the arm that enfolded her. The smell of his coat was almost animal. It reassured and encouraged her. She watched the houses stream by the window as they rushed to a place that Gleave had called home. She was like the colour that might otherwise play along these streets; she knew how to lose herself at night, become anonymous, although she couldn’t put her finger on where the knowledge came from, being unable to remember anything beyond what had happened in the last few hours. The illogicality of it distressed her only mildly. Her belly full, her head cushioned by the sublime beating of a friendly heart deep beneath this musky coat, she slept, and dreamed of her abilities as they quickened within her by the second; of what she would be capable when she woke. Of whom she would be capable.

CHAPTER SEVEN: KITCHEN SYNC

HE PREPARED A percolator of coffee while she bathed.

“Don’t you want to know my name?”

The flat was warm, if a little shabby, but the way her shoulders relaxed as she went in before him told him that if she had been feeling any anxiety it had dissipated at the sight of his sofa with a blanket thrown across it, or of the lamp on the table spilling warm colour across the wooden floor, the tired rug in front of the fire. How could anybody feel threatened when there was a picture on the wall of a view from Waterloo Bridge? Where was the danger in a flat where a bag of dolly mixtures was sitting on top of the fridge?

“I’ll guess it. Give me five guesses.”

He shared out the coffee and thought of the way she had stepped over the threshold of each room, her hand moving out to gently grasp the doorjamb, relaxing against the wood as though returning to a pose she had practised many times. Sean had stood behind her while she inspected the rooms. He liked the way he could see her eyelashes when she was in three-quarter profile; her short, brown hair and the fringe that flopped about her forehead; the blended, slightly plump curves of her cheekbones and mouth. She looked boyish and soft, but a hardness danced in her quick green eyes. He found himself wanting to show her his maps of cities from a hundred and fifty years ago and play her a piece of music that he adored in the hope that it would move her too.

“Hannah?”

“No.”

Light bled from a deep crack between the bathroom door and its frame. Carrying her cup, he was halted by the movement of her naked figure across the gap. She was a blur of pink, the flurry that fills a moment of space, but she passed through his mind in intimate detail.

“Fiona?”

“No.”

At the table in a kitchen with a tap that wouldn’t stop dripping, wrapped up in his towelling bathrobe, her hair slicked back, she sipped coffee and listened to him talk about London. It was nice to be in a room with a man and not have him want to wave his dick in her face. And then she surprised herself by opening up to him, telling him things that she could barely acknowledge to herself.

“Mildred?”

“Ugh. Piss off. No.”

For the last six years, since her grandmother had suffered a stroke and needed to be cared for, she’d walked a rut into the backstreets of the town. If she thought about the reams of men and women that had paid her dirty money to sign off her body for a few hours, she’d go mad. So she never thought of them. Well, hardly. Sometimes they’d dip into her sleep, these none-faces, these black ghosts, bruising the meat that they’d hired for a while, emptying themselves across the map of her body, scattering seed across a barren land that could sustain nothing of any warmth or significance any more.

“Isobel?”

“No. Last chance.”

Most of her friends were dead. She’d beaten the odds, staying alive on the streets for this long; life expectancy for prostitutes in the Northwest was dwindling all the time. Tonight it had seemed her turn had come. A saviour was rare, but she wondered how self-seeking his heroics might prove. She studied his face while he took up the conversational baton. He did not judge her; his face had not fallen when she revealed her true colours. It was a good face: angular and tough but something about his eyes and the shape of his lips hinted at vulnerability. It looked like a face that might cry while its owner was killing you.

Sirens looped across the night. A police helicopter, its belly loaded with cameras, striped the night with an acid-white spotlight that stabbed into the ruined flesh of the town, picking over the remains like a glutton at the bones of a roast.

“What’s in it for you then? What can you expect for saving me?”

“There’s never anything in it for me,” Sean said, at last. “But I feel… I don’t know… some degree of responsibility for you. Perhaps because I feel nothing for myself.”

“You don’t have to use chat-up lines, Sean. But it’s sweet of you to say so. Unfortunately, I don’t share your concern. I can take care of me better than anyone else, and if I get into trouble, that’s my look-out.”

Sean nodded. “I’ll say goodnight then. If you need anything, give me a shout.”

She kissed him on the cheek. He said: “Karen?” But she didn’t reply.

Heading for the sofa, he watched her disappear into his bedroom. He thought: She doesn’t remember me at all…

CHAPTER EIGHT: SURVIVAL INSTINCT

WILL WAITED FOR three hours, lurking in a church graveyard and walking the aisles of an all-night supermarket, before he returned. He paused a little way up the street from Cumberland Mansions. At the front of the house, sitting in an ancient, beige Allegro, was a man he had never seen before. He was wearing a thick, tight-fitting blue jumper, and a floppy cricket cap. He was affecting nonchalance, reading a newspaper but regularly flicking his attention to the entry door. Round the back, on the fire escape, he spied a woman in a greatcoat, smoking a cigarette. She moved to flick the stub into a garden, and the grip of a pistol tucked into her waistband pushed its way into view.

These two watching the front and back entrances might be police, but he found himself hanging back, reluctant to approach them. He wondered if they thought he might have killed his wife.

Will returned to the main street. He didn’t know where he could go. What if the news told of a man on the run, capable of violence? How could his friends take him in? His friends were also Cat’s friends; there could be no chance of some sort of skewed loyalty here. Even his closest companions would shop him; it was what he would do in the same position.

He caught a whiff of reefer, heard heavy, fast bass; a Saab parked up a sidestreet contained two teens watching the road. He knew them; they cruised around in their car late into the night, playing hip hop at full blast, or hung around outside coffee bars. Every time they saw his wife, one of them would smile and say: “Not long now, hey?”

The driver wound down the window without looking at Will as he approached.

“Want some blow?” he asked, softly. Now he did look. “Shit. Are you all right?”

Will said, “No. I want you to burgle my house.”

NOW PARKED ACROSS the way from Cumberland Mansions, Will watched from the car as the two kids – Known and Hot Badge – waited for the others they had phoned when Will had promised them it was no set-up and that they could keep what they could carry. All he wanted was a report on how the flat looked, and his coat and his wallet – untouched. Known had said: “Let’s see what we can’t do for you.”

“One more thing,” Will stipulated. “I want a weapon.”

The man in the cricket cap was clearly bothered by the sudden build-up of youths and had risen to his feet while trying to maintain a disaffected air. Known and Hot Badge and their friends, three or four louche boys in denim jackets and baseball caps, ambled across the road and up the steps to the front door. Cricket cap was on his phone once the lock had been sprung. Will huddled in the car, trying not to think too much about what they might find in his flat. The heater roared, coaxing movement back to his frozen joints. He closed his eyes and realised he was shifting into a dream. How could he sleep? But he saw Cat there now, waving to him through the warp and weft of his thoughts. With a slight tremor of fear, as of someone giving up life because of a lack of anything left within it to care about, he succumbed to the depths and followed her.

CHEKE HAD BEEN left in a stone room with a high window and a solid wooden door. A deep bath made of thick, frosted glass awaited her. The water was cold, but she had begun to understand how to alter herself to accommodate for temperature changes. She moved the blanket slightly and looked down at her body.

Already she was losing her hold on her own identity, such as it could be after such a short time – that which mapped out the set of characteristics was being subtly differed and she could feel invisible fingers plucking at her, though mercifully the change was painless. After a while she’d begun to notice it wasn’t restricted to her interior. Her breasts were swelling, the nipples becoming darker, more pronounced. Her hips were growing rounder, her buttocks firmer. Three moist, puckered punctures buttoned her abdomen. A curious fingernail made the punctures shiver and relax, betraying a moist, pink velvety lining within. The woman who had provided her with her first real sustenance did not have anything remotely resembling this formation on her. Absorbing her, feeling her body pulverise under the juices she ejaculated, Cheke had pored over the woman’s face, her interest quickening when death settled and her features relaxed. The woman had a rind of colour to her eyes; a dip at the apex of her top lip; just one set of canine teeth. Subtle differences, but they were fascinating to Cheke, who was coming to grips with the slow play of limbs still apparently discovering their true shape. Her body seemed to be going through a variety of minute alterations. She had spent an hour transfixed by the undulation of her knuckles, which dissolved and reknitted themselves in a new configuration. She couldn’t understand the motive for this mischief in her flesh, but she welcomed the freshness it inspired; the gradual improvement in her movement and thought.

She bathed, baptising this new body of hers. Faces she didn’t know (but seemed maddeningly familiar) loomed in the patterns of oil in the water, inspiring different levels of emotion. Hatred for this tired, ageing man; grief at the appearance of a woman with cataracts in her eyes; desire for a young man disfigured by scars almost beautiful in their symmetry. She realised with disappointment that these phantoms were somebody else’s memories, faces in the fire, tricking her into thinking they bore significance to her own life. She remained alone.

Her hands made their acquaintance with the fresh geography of skin and muscle, the experience both like self-exploration and the touching of another. Still there existed that vestigial tremor at her core – it transmitted itself no matter where her fingers reached.

“Why me?” she whispered.

A car drew up outside. Even before its doors opened she could hear Gleave barking orders.

She stepped from the bath and wrapped herself in a white towelling robe, the activity in her flesh reaching a new level of intensity. Her mouth filled with drool. A key in the lock. Only when the boy was pushed over the threshold did she realise the nature of its energy.

The boy stared at her. Ice cream was slicked across his jaws. His hair sprang up stubbornly at his crown. The door snicked shut.

The boy said, “Mummy?”

“If it makes you happy,” she whispered.

HE WOKE, FRUSTRATED, his heart pounding and his dick hard as a door handle. He had been unable to still Catriona. She had slipped in and out of focus, her words to him garbled, as though coming from a slightly detuned radio. Her smile was genuine enough, her mouth somehow super-real, Technicolor. He had been reaching to kiss her when she sank from view and he was unable to conjure her again.

But this wasn’t the only reason for his revival. The slap of fast-moving footsteps had him blinking and scooting back in his seat as Known and his gang came pounding across the road. Behind them, Cricket cap had got out of the car and was standing uncertainly in the road, alternating his gaze between the heels of the burglars and the flapping entrance door.

“Got enough stuff there?” Will asked, indicating the television and stereo equipment with which Known’s gang were laden.

“Actually, we were thinking of going back for some more. Would you mind?”

“I don’t care,” Will said. “Was… Cat there?”

“No. Should she of been? This some kind of kinky trick to jazz up your sex life, then?”

“Forget it. Did you get my wallet?”

Hot Badge passed over the wallet, at pains to point out that nothing had been taken from it.

“And there was something else?”

Known pursed his lips. “I’m a bit miffed that you think of me as someone who carries small arms around in his pockets, but here… enjoy it.”

Will took the gun. It seemed woefully small. “What ammo does it take?” he asked. “Caps?”

“Funny.” A box of shells was passed over.

“Is it easy to load?” Will twisted and turned the gun in his hand. It gleamed dully, like a snake’s skin, under the courtesy light.

“Shit, mate,” said Known. “Want me to shoot the bastard for you as well?”

“Never mind. I’ll figure it out.”

“Who are them mongs, anyway?” Hot Badge nodded back at Cricket cap, who had been joined by his colleague. They were both looking in the direction of the car.

“Friends of the family,” Will said.

“Well they’s going to go visit some poor bastard called Slowheaf next. Fort you might like to know.”

“Slowheaf?”

“Well, wiv a T-H at the end. Slowheaf.”

“Slowheath. Right.”

“Yeah. What I said. Some hard-sounding bastard came froo on the walkie-talkies while I was fuckin’ the lock. ‘We ’it Slowheaf next,’ he said.”

Will shrugged. The name meant nothing to him.

“Whatever.” Known lost interest with commendable swiftness. “What now?”

Will pulled the hood of his jogging top over his head and eased out of the car. He watched the gang stuffing the fruits of his marriage to Cat into the back.

“Something extremely foolish, probably,” he said.

“Nice doing business,” Known said. Everyone left.

The sky was bruising rapidly. The gun in his waistband felt impossibly huge now. He didn’t know if he would ever be able to use it. He watched the house and waited for change.

A car pulled up a little over an hour later. It was dark by then, and the cold was drawing the colour from his hands. A full moon, and those streetlamps that had not been shattered, turned the grey pavement into a strange, luminous strip of pale orange. Will watched Cricket cap and his female counterpart walk up the street to meet it. Two men got out; they talked for a few moments; Cricket cap and the woman got into their own car. They all left.

Will strode into West End Lane. He bypassed his home, forcing himself not to look, and wondered how such a course of events could have put him in a position where he was dicking around in the cold, his life in shreds, when he should have been helping his wife to relax while counting the fingers and toes of his little boy. The loss of the baby and Cat’s disappearance, maybe even her death, had reduced the meaning of his life here to nothing more substantial than the dust that skirled around West End Lane’s back alleys. He didn’t know what to do. There was no point going back to the flat. They might have booby-trapped the place or one of the men might return while he was in there. Then what now? He felt frustrated and impotent, as in the common dream he sometimes had where he knew he must get to an appointment on time but the moment he went to open the door to leave, he remembered he had forgotten to brush his teeth or pick up his keys or turn off the electric blanket. Without realising, he was stumping up and down the pavement, his hands clenching into fists, repeating the name “Slowheath, Slowheath, Slowheath…”

Who was this Slowheath? How did you begin to find a person you didn’t know anything about? That question, and the sight of a slow-moving police car nosing into the lane from the Finchley Road end, got him moving.

Maybe there was one person he could rely on after all.

SHE COULD SENSE them, beyond these walls. Somehow they were watching her.

Her body wanted to change. It fluxed and fluttered beneath a skin that seemed too paltry to contain her. The woman and the boy forced themselves to the surface and she had to work hard to quell them. Only when she could exercise control over herself would it be possible to bring her otherness into play.

She felt their eyes scorching her. They were waiting for her to acquiesce to what was inside her; to be comfortable with who she was. She sensed they were testing her. Well, she thought, pressing her hand against the thick wooden door, the test was over.

The cameras were not, as Cheke had supposed, inside the cell, but poised just outside. A guard with a grenade launcher was positioned in full armour at the mouth of the corridor, ready to abort should she render.

“It’s started,” the guard said.

His earpiece crackled. “Stay with it.”

The paint on the door blistered. The smell of charred wood prefaced the sudden shape of two hands emerging through the door. At the same time, in the small viewing window, a face appeared, rippled to nonsense by the cracks and the natural warp of the wire-enforced glass pattern. The face became the glass, cracks and all, oozing squarely through the frame. Coins of blood fell from its skin and the guard noticed how the glass had somehow fused with the flesh. He was so taken by the beauty of its passage that he sat back against the wall to watch, his lips shock-dry, his need to both laugh and bawl cancelling each other into awed silence.

He could see every nuance of her progress through the door; an intimacy between the living and the inert – if living was what she was. Only when her eyes, freshly blinked free of paint, splinters of wood and glass, met his own did he feel the first stitch of panic.

As she plucked the last shreds of her body from the door, the guard realised she was naked, but it had taken him until now to establish that. Her body was of a rudimentary configuration only; much of it ran in loops and strands. Liquid parts of her dribbled to the floor then swiftly collected and rejoined her mass like quicksilver. They wrapped around gaping, bloodless holes in which hints of muscle and bone could be seen. Her body turned brilliant white in an instant, generating a burst of intense heat that did for the cameras and tanned the guard’s face.

“What is it, Exley?” The fussy voice was full of needles. Exley, the guard, had forgotten all about his grenade launcher.

The flux of her face was at the same time both horrific and bizarrely tranquil; he was put in mind of lava lamps. When his voice came back she’d surged across the few feet between them, flowing over his legs, numbing them with her delicious chill.

“I don’t know what it is,” he whispered, as she covered his mouth with what passed for her own.

Although they were on her within fifteen seconds, dragging her away from Exley, the damage had been done. The soft tissue of his face was a pulped mass. Gleave, in the moment before he shot him through the forehead, couldn’t work out whether what dangled from the centre of his face was a tongue or an eyeball.

“Impressive,” came a gravelly voice at his shoulder. “And I don’t mean your sharp-shooting.”

“She’s the fastest we’ve seen. She’s almost ready. And this is, what… eighteen hours after we put the draw on her?”

“Give or take.”

“So what now?”

“Come and have a drink.”

Gleave followed the older man along a corridor carpeted with deep, wine-dark pile. He had been with the Junction for almost fifteen years now, yet was no closer to knowing Leonard Butterby than he was his partner, Thomas Lousher, or the history that they shared. Rumour was a rogue bull in this place: it could gore you if you messed about with it. The only whispers Gleave allowed himself to believe involved the suggestions of violence that had followed the pair around as they grew up in London during the ’60s and ’70s. Neither Butterby nor Lousher had any previous; at least, there was nothing on record. What the linens had printed on the couple over the last quarter of a century you could find in a few paragraphs devoted to their charity work. They were barbed wire without the barbs; nothing snagged.

“Absolut, isn’t it?”

Gleave nodded.

“Absolute disgrace, more like. Arseman’s drink, if you ask me. Here—”

Gleave took his drink and sat opposite Butterby, who had poured himself a large Scotch. A big desk, empty but for a blotter and a Meisterstück fountain pen, separated them.

“I don’t need to tell you how bollock-shrivellingly important the next few weeks are going to be—”

“No,” said Gleave.

“—but I’m fucking well going to. Fuck up once, just once, mind, and your arse is going to look like a choice cuts diagram on a butcher’s shop wall.”

Gleave swallowed hard, wishing there was some ice in his drink, something to chink against the glass and lend a little relief to this ordeal.

“We had word come in this morning. There’s agitation.”

“Where?”

“You know where. Fifteen years of nice and easy, and now the blood’s up. Check out this convergence. I want them wasted. I don’t want any fuck-ups. Now finish your drink and fuck off.”

Gleave put the glass down, even though he had barely wetted his lips with the contents. He knew Butterby well enough not to piss him off; at least he went through the motions of hospitality. Butterby and Lousher were yesterday’s men; they just didn’t realise it yet. Old, old men. Their power was failing. A tingle in his gut, unlike anything he’d felt in a decade and a half, drove him to pick up his pace on the way back to the ops room. A convergence. He wondered which of the Inserts it might be. Chances were, they’d be able to hit them fast before they became aware of their abilities.

Cheke was mopping up the juices on the carpet. Everyone else was watching her, afraid to say anything. Gleave went to her. “Come with me,” he said. And to one of the suits: “Bring me a file on the lost.” He would have to work through the night to train her on the basics of human interaction. She must learn not to draw attention to herself. She must be a ghost, until circumstances demand she reveal her gifts.

Pausing in the chill corridor, before allowing her into his office, he said: “Cheke. How are your eyes now?”

She shifted behind him, in the brown gloom of the passageway. “I can see…” Her voice was that of a child’s opening a Christmas box and finding what its heart had ached for. “I can see the pores on the back of your hand closing. I can see your pulse in the cut of your clothes.”

Gleave moved, all the better to disguise the shiver that ran through him. “That’s good,” he said.

She digested the file within minutes, the photographs and names committed to a mind that was still sharpening yet was already far beyond the swiftness of anything human.

“We’ll start you off on someone easy,” Gleave said. “It’s the man in the flat. The man we should have finished off, but he got away. He could be dangerous. He might expose us. Then there will be others.”

“When I’ve caught them—”

Gleave leaned forwards across the desk. For the first time, he was able to scrutinise properly the face that was gathering itself from the genetic spaghetti of its constituent parts. She was going to become rather lovely. Her eyes were hooded, and cat-sly, a blue so pale it was almost dangerously conspicuous. Her hair was black, piled in thick curls. The cruelty in her mouth made up for the innocence of the arch in her brows.

“Yes?”

“When I’ve caught them…” She smiled, desperation edging her words.

Gleave tried to return the humour, but his lips failed him. “Yes?”

“Can I eat them?”

CHAPTER NINE: CONTACT

IT HAD BEEN a good five years since Will had set foot on Dartmouth Park Road. He hoped Elisabeth still lived here and hadn’t moved on. He pushed through the gate – which still wailed in the same high-low fashion – and rapped on the door. When it opened, there was a hand that flew to a mouth, a dreadful crash as the plate Elisabeth had been drying fell to the floor.

Will said, “Pleased to see me then?”

WHAT HAD BEEN their living room contained the same curtains they had picked together from IKEA. Mango, the cat they had chosen from a litter belonging to a Maine Coon breeder in West Croydon, regarded him from the windowsill with the same mix of disdain and suspicion. Elisabeth was sitting with her slim legs winding around each other, elbow resting on her knee, cigarette burning between well-manicured fingers. Her hair had been cut short; her high cheekbones formed the inverted base of a triangle completed by the thick, ruby bow of her mouth.

“You look fantastic,” he said.

“You look like a stunt, Will,” she said. “You look like shit in a jacket.”

“I aim to please.”

“That’d be a first.”

Will held his hands up. “Look, Elisabeth. I’m not here to fight you.”

“What the fuck are you here for? Money? You still living in that shit pit with vinegar tits? My fucking patient, she was. I should have pulled the fucking plug on her before you got wind of her.” Elisabeth took a huge, violent drag on her cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray that might as well have been Will’s face.

“Elisabeth, I—” And then he couldn’t go on. The grief that had been rattling around inside like a loose coin in a machine spat out of him with such force that Elisabeth moved back in her seat, her hand covering her mouth, her eyes large in their sockets. As she blurred before him, Will slid onto the floor and let it happen. By the end, his chin and chest were a thin gravy of snot and tears and saliva. His chest hurt from all the sobbing. He was exhausted.

Elisabeth said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not you,” he said. “Cat. She’s been kidnapped. I think she might be dead.”

Elisabeth closed her eyes and for a while the two of them were silent. Then, very slowly, Elisabeth moved over to him, sat by him, and slipped an arm around his shoulders.

She said, “You’ve lost weight.”

“There was a baby. Our baby… I mean, one that me and Cat were going to have. We lost it.”

Elisabeth tensed but did not remove her arm. Her voice was cold when she spoke again. “I don’t know what you think I can do for you, Will. I mean, it’s not as if we parted in a way that would ever be described in the maturity textbook, is it? I’m very sorry about what’s happened to you, but why have you come here?”

“You’re all I know,” he said. His voice had dwindled to breath and little else. “Men came to our house. They were going to kill me.”

“Will? What are you talking about?”

The urgency in her voice couldn’t rouse him from the exhausted sleep that he suddenly fell into. Elisabeth was able to grab a cushion from the sofa before his head hit the floor. One of his hands retreated to his eyes, covering them as though to prevent him from seeing something awful. It was hours before she could get him up, in any sense of the word.

ELISABETH SAID, “THERE’S nobody called Slowheath on the net.”

“Fuck it,” Will spat. He was sitting at her shoulder, watching as her fingers flew over the keyboard of her laptop. The computer’s hard drive softly chirruped and chuckled as it processed Elisabeth’s request and vomited the results up on screen. The window in the basement study showed a mass of foliage, topped by a portion of pavement. Occasional legs would stride by, casting stop-start patterns of shadow across the room.

Will said, “Are you sure?”

“You can see for yourself. Hang on. What about Sloe Heath?”

“Who he?”

“It’s not a he. It’s an it. It’s a hospital in the Northwest. Just outside Warrington.” She jotted an address on a piece of paper.

“I’m not sure.”

“Well.” Elisabeth swivelled to face him. The whiteness of the screen behind her made it difficult to see the cast of her features. She pressed the scrap into his hand. “There’s nothing else. You’ll have to try. Tell the police. They’ll look into it for you.”

“I can’t get the police involved. I’m already on their shit list.”

“What do you mean?”

“Receiving stolen goods. And there was an affray in the town centre.”

“An affray? What’s that supposed to mean? Don’t talk copspeak with me. What did you do?”

“I was in a fight. A knife was pulled—”

“Oh, Will…”

“Not me. I didn’t have the knife. I headbutted this guy. Broke his nose.”

They were quiet for a while. Then Elisabeth said, “That’s why we aren’t together any more.”

“You don’t have to explain, Eli. That was five years ago. I can work it out for myself. But I can’t go to them. They’ll think I did it.”

“What will you do now?”

“I have to go up there. Catriona might still be alive.”

Elisabeth was becoming, in these moments, much as she used to be when she grew agitated by their arguments. She drew breath as though to say something and then fell silent. It was like watching a shy person struggling to express herself.

“The police,” she blurted finally, persistently. “You must go to them.”

“I can’t,” he said, simply. “There’s no time. They wouldn’t listen to me.”

“I’ll back you up.”

“No. I have to go now. Do you still have the car?”

It was as if, in a second, Elisabeth’s rigidity towards him had returned. She gave him a better view of her chin. “Fuck off, Will. My help desk has just closed.”

“Eli—”

“Don’t Eli me. You’re on your own.”

The burbling computer and a slow foot on broken glass in the street filled the silence. Will was grateful that Elisabeth wasn’t pushing for him to leave, but he knew that it wouldn’t be long in coming.

He said, “Can you smell anything burning?”

Elisabeth regarded him blankly. “Do I look like I’m cooking?”

“Well something’s caught. Are you sure you haven’t got anything on the stove?”

A finger of smoke curled around the door.

Elisabeth said, “Shit.”

She flew upstairs to the kitchen, but there was nothing on the cooker. Will checked her when she hurried back into the hallway. Something in his poise stopped her dead.

He put his finger to his lips; his reddened eyes shifted their focus to a point behind her. She turned to find the back door smouldering, a black handprint gaining definition in the grain of its wood.

“What—” she managed, before Will gripped her hand.

“We have to leave,” he said. “Now.”

She nodded.

“Where’s the car?”

They left by the front door. The sun was a fat, orange, cold thing wrapped in mist, low in the too-blue sky. Frost marbled the roads. A heavy woman in a nurse’s uniform laboured over the handles of an ageing bicycle.

“Show me,” said Will.

They hurried to the corner of Dartmouth Park Road as a series of muffled crashes peppered the stillness they’d vacated.

“I was followed,” Will said.

“Who?” Elisabeth glanced back at him as he propelled her along the pavement. She caught his strangled answer I don’t know, and then her attention was dragged over his shoulder by frenetic movement in their wake. Elisabeth could see, over the top of Mr. Royle’s neatly clipped hedges, a head, jerky with intent. Whoever it was moved fast. Faster than them.

“Where’s this fucking car?”

Elisabeth was about to answer when their pursuer stepped out from behind the hedge, sucking the breath from her.

“How can she run?” she managed at last, before Will pulled her off the road. He had spotted Elisabeth’s car – a cherry-red Volkswagen Golf – parked in a familiarly skewed fashion in a side street. It still bore a scratch from a visit they had made to Abersoch years before.

“Keys,” he demanded. He was wondering how the woman could walk, let alone run. Her legs had been molten, running into each other in shapeless flesh loops before rediscovering normality.

One hand had hovered beneath her chin, like a soup-eater aware of his lack of skill with the spoon, to scoop back great drifts of skin that oozed off the boss of her skull.

Elisabeth was laughing, her eyes as big as eggs. “The keys are on the fridge. Next to a bag of plums.”

They moved on, past Elisabeth’s car, aiming for the top of the road. Will could see there was no way they would make it before the woman caught them. What was wrong with her? Was it leprosy?

“Maybe you should talk to her?” Elisabeth gasped. She was clutching the side of her stomach, fighting a stitch. “Maybe she needs help.”

“Fuck that. She’s not after a cup of sugar, I assure you.”

The woman – if she could be called that – continued to gather pace and form. Now Will saw that she was only able to observe them since coins of flesh had peeled away from her face, allowing vague smears of colour to resolve themselves as eyes. Her targets locked, she arrowed towards them.

God, Will thought. She sniffed us out.

She was almost upon them when Will jinked left, hauling Elisabeth down a narrow alleyway. Up ahead, Hampstead Heath rolled away from them, raked by mist.

Will glanced back; her cornering wasn’t too clever. The effort to right herself meant she lost control of her substance. When she hove into view once more, her extremities were knitting themselves back into true.

In this fashion, he was able to put some distance between them. On the main road, he chanced upon a taxi pulling away from its rank.

“Anywhere. Drive,” he ordered, as they spilled into the back seat. She came for them out of the lane like a greyhound from a trap. Will watched her receding through the back window as she gamely attempted to pursue. As soon as it was evident she could not catch them, she switched off and set a new course instantly, never once reciprocating Will’s interest in her.

“So,” Elisabeth said. “Who’s she?” Her hands were covering her face and he could see her lower lip trembling. Nevertheless, some of the sass was creeping back into her voice now they were safe. “Jealous girlfriend?”

CHAPTER TEN: TORPOR

CHEKE INVADED A house and fed on the woman who lived there. She found a dark room underneath the building and slowed her heart, hoping that wisdom would creep into her and show her how to plan her next move. Sleeping, she allowed the flux of a new code to infuse her, amalgamating, refreshing her with otherness.

She was losing her hold over her own identity, the original that had mapped out her character from the start, although she could no longer remember enough about that being to gauge whether or not that was a good thing. The mirror was showing a woman where there’d been a girl the day before. When her mind wasn’t distracted by the fizzing of synapses as new thoughts – too complex for her to even begin to unravel – started to bloom, she considered the circumstances of her birth. All that diabolical screaming. And, just before the shock of the real, a feeling of being invaded with freshness, of being augmented with substance. The man who had wrapped her in a towel and warmed her – the thought of him made her shiver with love. She would do anything for him. Anything. Although a tiny part of her wondered why, when she regarded him with nothing but affection and respect, she saw all others as nothing more than meat.

She resisted going into the street in case she brought attention upon herself – and also because her transition was incomplete – so she was only tangentially aware of what was happening outside. The murmur of traffic, a skitter of shoes on the pavement. At night, through a grille in the ceiling, she saw the houses lose their shape to the darkness, squares of pale colour dotting their invisibility: people who could not sleep. An hour later, her breathing decreased to one inhalation every four minutes; as she felt the bones of her pelvis dissolve and re-knit into a broader shape, she heard a telephone ringing on one of the floors above her. An answer machine cut in and she heard giggling voices tell the woman she was becoming when they would arrive. Same time tomorrow night. She recognised the voice. The person who owned it was called… Susan… Suzanne… Susannah. Susannah.

What is my name?

It seemed that by the following morning her transition was complete. It took a few hours to emerge from torpor, by which time she felt refreshed and dangerous. The curve of her body was noticeable through her ill-fitting clothes. She felt a scar creep across her hip, watched a constellation of freckles birth themselves on the bridge of her nose. Yet as she studied her new aspect in the bathroom mirror, it became evident the change hadn’t ceased, that it went beyond this new physicality. Something was niggling her; a memory she’d never had before, one that seemed to call at her before the shock of the new. She couldn’t fully understand how this was. There was a compulsion to achieve something, to fulfil a pledge she couldn’t recall making. And other things too: the vague itch in her bones which might or might not be the calming of her marrow after such an upheaval. What did it mean? Only a tiny part of her gawped at the rushing of these events – presumably the area of her mind that groped for clues to who she was – for her name, the stock of memories she treasured were dwindling like tail-lights in mist.

Who am I? What is my name?

Enough of her remained to know she was being possessed or, more accurately, subsumed, but the thrill of the experience erased any fear.

Later, as the dark came again, she rubbed moisturisers into her skin, enjoying the sheen that it created, the softness. She inspected every bit of her body and when she was finished, she started again, until she was intimate with all of it.

She whispered, “Who am I?”

Footsteps on the path outside. She could hear Simon and Susannah and Joe? Joel? Jonathan laughing. Perhaps she should persuade them to go for a drink. Wasn’t that what usually happened when she had visitors? But no. Alcohol, and all its attendant possibilities, held no frisson for her; rather, other appetites had begun to develop, along with her psyche and the ripe shell in which she was contained.

Vacating the bathroom, she wrapped herself in a white towelling robe and went downstairs, the activity in her bones reaching a new level of intensity. Only when they piled through the door carrying suitcases and food parcels did she finally realise the nature of its energy.

They stared at her. The door swung shut.

“Dawn?” gaped Susannah.

Dawn… of course.

“In a manner of speaking,” she replied, untying the robe, watching her body spill to the floor.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: M

THEY JOINED THE motorway at Brent Cross. The traffic was heavy, but fluid, winding into the first curves like the swift channelling of water. They had arrived at Elisabeth’s parents’ house around lunchtime. Katherine, her mother, accepted them both with a curt nod; she had always resented Will for his treatment of her daughter. He was in no mood now to pick up on an argument five years old, especially as he thought he had acted correctly, ending a relationship swiftly because it had seemed to have run its course. That Cat was already sleeping in his bed at the time should not have been an issue, but Katherine had berated him for weeks afterwards, strafing him with phone calls long after Eli had accepted the outcome.

“I need to borrow your car,” Elisabeth had told her as she made them both mugs of tea in the narrow, sunlit kitchen. Katherine had handed over the keys without a peep, but gave them both icy, unblinking stares. Elisabeth was old enough now not to be told where she was going wrong. Still, with her mother unrelenting with this slow-burn look, Elisabeth told her: “I know. I know,” as they left the house.

THEY WERE A mile shy of Rugby, the radio masts clearly visible, when the car in front of them lifted into the sky. The beginning of Eli’s startled cry was eclipsed by an explosion that seemed to rupture the air itself. In the moment before their car was flipped over by the shockwave, Will thought he caught a glimpse of what death meant. It shimmered in the core of bloody colour spraying from the split petrol tank of their doomed neighbour; it engulfed the car with a film of uncertainty, before the flames tucked in and ruined the illusion of insubstantiality with some of their own. And then a pocket of dark to hide in for a while, as all around them pieces of the sky and the earth swapped places.

HE REVIVED FIRST, certain that Elisabeth was dead. A lump the size of a walnut had risen from the side of her head, just above her ear, which was torn and bloody. A tooth had been chipped and her lip was swollen and red. A worrying amount of blood had darkened the area of her T-shirt that covered her breasts.

“Eli.” Will reached over and dug into her throat with his fingers, searching for signs of life. It was there, a pulse stronger than he was expecting. He breathed out, shocked by sudden tears. He must not fold now; they might still be in danger from the fires. Although the windscreen was a riot of cracks, rendering the glass opaque, he could see how the sky was orange and waxy with movement.

Will managed to kick open the corrugated mess of the door. His seatbelt was preventing him from falling on top of Elisabeth; the car had come to a stop on the passenger side. Grabbing hold of the steering wheel, Will released the belt and hauled himself through the gap, gritting his teeth to an agony that never came. Now he could see the road, or what remained of it. Great jags of tarmac had been forced into the air, as if from a tectonic collision. Smoke rose, either in urgent, pumping cones of black or gently wafting veils, depending on the severity of the flame that fuelled it. Will stopped counting when he reached twenty charred vehicles. Another dozen or so had escaped the fires but disintegrated in the ensuing pile-up. Rounding the crimped bonnet of the Golf, he saw a limb on the roadside, neatly encased in a pink cardigan sleeve. The fingers were gripping a half-eaten chunky Kit Kat.

Will rubbed his face as he felt the heat draining away from it. Fainting wasn’t going to be of use to anyone. He pressed his shoulder against the roof of the car. By rocking against it, his movements becoming progressively more violent as the balance shifted, he was able to generate enough momentum for it to right itself. Elisabeth jounced and flopped in the passenger seat, her senseless movements like those of a soft toy, renewing Will’s nausea. For a moment, he believed the car might be all right for all its dents and fractures, but then he saw there was no road to drive upon, even if the engine did turn.

Sirens flew into the hot sky behind him, at a distance too great for him to fathom what was causing them. He couldn’t understand the reason for the panic that flitted through him; Elisabeth might be critically ill, she might need urgent medical attention.

So why am I doing this? he asked himself as he wrenched open the passenger door and eased her out of the seat. Her arms jerked under his touch; she said: “Not in that colour,” before falling silent once more.

He tip-toed with her through the wreckage, hoping to find a gap in the buckled road, but the trauma had been too great. Walking wounded drifted by him, ignoring him, as dazed as lost tourists.

The embankment was littered with broken glass and hot rinds of metal. He staggered to the bottom where a fence pegged back a ditch and a field that fell away to a smudge of woods. Cows chewed like outlaws in a Western. Smoke rolled down the embankment here. Will strode through it, trying to shut out the dreadful cooking odours that enveloped him. He was on the other side of the smoke wall, angling his way back up to the road when he again had the curious epiphanic certainty that he understood death, that its secret was somehow within his grasp. He almost dropped Elisabeth. To his right, limning the edge of the oil-smoke, sunshine picked out what appeared to be solid surfaces, dented and mottled like beaten tin. Yet there was nothing behind it, no caved-in car or jack-knifed juggernaut. Someone was screaming somewhere. His attention diverted for a second, the moment was lost: just oil-smoke rolling into a brilliant winter sky.

The clamour of rescue behind him, Will breasted the embankment to find more confusion. The explosion that had halted him was not the only one. The distant road sported similar eruptions. Will almost hoped that Elisabeth would die; the remainder of his journey would have to be by foot.

He had to get her off the road, at least until the pandemonium was over. A series of blackened farmhouse buildings – stock-sheds, stables, a barn – were collapsed against each other about a quarter of a mile to the east. There was nothing else.

The embankment was less treacherous on the opposite side, the fence not as well tended. Elisabeth sneezed three times as he made his way through the rape fields, knowing that he must be as conspicuous as a fly on a wedding cake, but nobody called to stop him.

About three hundred yards shy of the fire-ravaged stables, Will heard the first deep, blatting rotor beats of helicopters. It was a directionless sound, fading and coming, fading and coming. Will’s neck ached, trying to pinpoint the source. He didn’t like the way his senses were abandoning him; perhaps he had been damaged in the crash, in a way he could not yet understand. Finally, as he moved into the shade of a line of silver birch, he saw them: half a dozen emergency service helicopters, low on the horizon, coming in from the south.

The stables were gutted. None of the four had contained horses for a long time. The fire that had done for the buildings had been a major affair, although the main house had been only partially consumed.

Will left Elisabeth propped up against an ancient engine block that was so large it must have belonged to a tractor. He spread his coat across her. She was still unconscious but her brow was knitted, as though she were deep in concentration. Will whispered to her that he would be back, then padded across to the farmhouse. Fire engines were scattered across the motorway, trying to control the flames. As he watched, a car exploded, half of it spinning into the air like a toy at the hands of a tantrum child. Great arcs of thick foam were directed to this fresh blaze. More helicopters clattered overhead, heavier types carrying water that was discharged in ribbons over the carnage. A rainbow flashed across the sky for a few seconds.

To gain access, Will had to kick in some boards covering a ground-floor window, but they were rotting and gave way easily. Fire had peeled away much of the inner skin of the room; the walls were scorched brick, floorboards had been exposed above and beneath him. The smell of the fire had long since vanished; now the dampness was thick with the sour smell of spoor and rot. There was nothing of use here. Will moved deeper into the house. A staircase reached into the heights but had been cheated of its ambition; the final half-dozen risers were missing, trashed by an infalling of masonry. In the kitchen he found an old, unopened roll of toilet tissue. Cairns of unidentifiable animal shit were scattered in some indecipherable pattern. A cracked, fly-speckled window wrenched the M1 disaster site into something unworldly. Smoke was condensed by the flaws in the glass; the rescuers were more hunched and twisted than the survivors they pulled from the wreckage. Will’s neck tingled. It was not just the shock of the accident or the thrill of having survived. He had witnessed something other just now. An opening, a promise of a different place. The opportunity to gain finer understanding. The unimaginable laid bare, perhaps, and made simple. It was as if God had dropped some of his blueprints into Will’s lap.

He tried to push the sensation away. Thoughts like this weren’t going to help Elisabeth. Will climbed the stairs carefully, vaulting the gap and moving across the landing to the bathroom. Fallen chunks of plaster concealed much of the carpet in here. A faded map of Australia took up the majority of one canary-yellow wall. Cracked, multi-coloured tiles finished the decoration above a badly stained enamel bath. An upside-down bottle of Aveda shampoo and a nailbrush were the only adornments, not counting the desiccated robin in the wash basin.

In the medicine cabinet, Will found a small, ancient tube of lignocaine and a plastic tub filled with Ibuprofen, the seal of which was still intact even if the expiry date had come and gone a year ago.

“It will do,” he muttered, and the closeness of his voice made his neck tingle.

He retraced his steps and was about to leap over the gap in the stairs when he saw something glittering in its darkness. At first he thought they were coins, but when he bent to pick them up, he realised, too late, that they weren’t.

CHAPTER TWELVE: SHIVERY EYES

THE FOREMAN WAS a stocky, catarrhal man who wore a Manchester City pin just below the knot of his tie. “Rapler,” he introduced himself. “Tony Rapler.” It wasn’t much of an interview. Rapler asked him, over superheated cups of weak coffee, what experience he had had on building sites.

“Not much,” admitted Sean. “But when I was younger I did some casual labour on small sites. Building garages and extensions, that type of thing.”

“You look fit. Work out much? Swimmer?”

“I run a bit. And my last job was warehouseman, humping kitchen units and firecheck doors around. It helps.”

“Any form?” Rapler asked.

“No. I’m disappointingly clean.”

Rapler laughed. “You’ll be fine. We need a few more meatheads about the place. All we get are students sniffing around for a few weeks’ work in the summer. They usually cry off after a couple of days. Think they’re going to turn into Lou Ferrigno – ‘Aye, boss, no trouble. I could carry bricks all day’ – and before you know it they’re walking around like they’ve just had a hernia.”

“What was this place?” Sean asked.

“Built in the 1970s. Nobody knows what it was meant to be. Hotel most probably. But it was also an office block, with a private residential quarter and a leisure facility. You could have been born inside and never had a need to go out. Maybe if they built it down south it would have worked, but up here?”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah, up to a point. Guy who designed it, Peter de Fleche, hanged himself. Dutch. After it was abandoned and the demolition orders went through you’d see him in this fucked-up Jag, giving it the slow drive-by. Felt as if he’d failed, they reckon. Did a couple other buildings in a similar vein. Then nothing.”

“He doesn’t need to know any more.”

Sean turned to see the barrel-chested man from the funeral standing in the doorway. He had so much neck it resembled a collar for his head to nestle in.

Rapler said, “This is Ronnie Salt. You’ll answer to him on the softstrip. He runs a good team, does Ronnie.”

Ronnie nodded at him. Up close, his eyes were unpleasant splashes of cement-grey either side of a nose that might have once been used as a blacksmith’s anvil. The two men walked across the sunken, blasted forecourt to the condemned building as another man turned up. He nodded at them and Rapler clapped his hand on the new man’s shoulder. “Marshall?” Rapler asked, “Jamie Marshall?” They disappeared back inside his Portakabin.

“Why is it being knocked down?” Sean asked, as they approached the de Fleche building.

Salt regarded him with what looked like a wince, as if he had expected Sean to be mute and was now resigned to having to converse with him. “Well, it’s completely shagged out. I mean, look at it. Nobody has lived there or worked in it for years. Sick building. Air conditioning system never right. Couple of people died. Airborne disease.”

“Great. Must be a pleasure to spend your days in there.”

Salt sneered at him. “It’s a job.”

The front of the de Fleche building soared away from them like the prow of a ship. The entrance was a fly-blown revolving door ten feet high with so many cracks it looked like a feature. Behind the fogged barrier of glass, a bank of shattered TV screens hung from the ceiling over a horseshoe desk. Sean tried to imagine what the lobby must have looked like.

“Let’s have a closer look,” he said.

The doors gritted and squealed as they pushed through. The air in here was a urinous melange; a deep scar in the far wall showed how vagrants might have gained access. Squatter evidence lay around them: empty tins, shit-streaked toilet tissue in a bin sack, newspapers bearing dates from half a decade previously.

Salt stood by the door, his hands in his pockets, toeing something small and shrivelled that owned claws and a tail.

“Has work started on this place yet?” Sean asked.

“Yeah. We’re going top to bottom. Just a couple of floors done so far. Slow job.”

“Where’s your team?”

A blunt thumb jutted upwards. “Wordy bastard aren’t you? Do you ask so many questions all the time?”

Sean spread his hands. “Just being friendly.”

“Keep friendly for your knitting circle, or whatever it is you do when you leave us. Work is here. Hard fucking work. And I will come down on you like the knives at a knacker’s yard if you step out of line. Hear me? Don’t like it? Hard-hat off, fuck off. Simple as that.”

“I understand,” Sean said.

Salt regarded him for a few seconds longer, then jutted his thumb north again. “Let’s go.”

HE FELT LIKE a zoo animal in a new kind of viewing experience, one in which the attractions are led around a static public. Smoke and the smell of over-brewed tea hung sourly in the room. On one wall, a calendar depicted a topless woman sitting on the bonnet of a Ferrari eating melting ice cream.

Salt said, without any attempt at pointing out the owners of the names: “Robbie Deakin, Tim Enever, Lutz Singkofer, Nicky Preece, Jez Cartledge. This is… tits… forgotten your name. Steve?”

“Sean. Sean Redman.”

“Right then, I’ll let you get on. Show him what’s what. Maybe start him off on the loose wall in the bathroom.” Salt left, grabbing a fish paste sandwich from a wrap of foil on one of the men’s knees. “I’ll be back in an hour,” he called, as his boots began their descent.

An embarrassed silence fell. Sean broke it: “Have you worked together as a team long?”

“’Bout six month,” replied the man with the fish paste sandwiches. He offered one to Sean. Sean accepted. “I’m Robbie. Salty’s a miserable old bastard. Ignore him. We hardly ever see him anyway. He normally fucks off to the pub when Vernon’s not around.”

“Who’s Vernon?” Sean bit into the sandwich. It reminded him of childhood. Salty, cheap paste. Margarine on bland white bread.

Robbie said, “Vernon Lord. He’s the chief. He’s the sub-contractor. Gets us quite a bit of work. We had a guy, what was his name? Anyway, he was shite. Smackhead. So we need another. Six men is more or less right for this job.”

“Five and a half, Rob, if you’re counting Tim.” The guy who had spoken raised a hand to Sean. “All right mate? I’m Nicky. This is Jez and that’s Lutz.”

Sean said, “Lutz? You German?”

“Fuck off,” said Lutz, in a loose, Mancunian whine. “I’m from Chorley, me.”

Nicky nodded at another figure, hunched over a paperback novel. “That’s Tim. AKA Shivery Eyes.”

Tim looked up as Robbie leant over to ask Sean if he wanted some tea.

“Yeah sure,” Sean said, studying the candyfloss hair and the too-big eyes. More quietly, he asked: “What’s up with him?”

Robbie checked Tim and grinned. “What isn’t? He’s all right, Tim. Aren’t you, Timmy? All right?”

Tim said, “Sound.” His voice was low and whispery. He looked like a tuberculosis “after” picture. His eyes slow-blinked gummily, crusted with goo. A pane of spit sealed his open mouth. The breath he drew in through his nose turned to liquid in his lungs. Sean could clearly see his ribs under the fabric of an ancient Duran Duran T-shirt.

“Is he fit to do this kind of work?” Sean murmured.

“What? Making the tea and bringing us stuff from the shop? He manages that all right, mate.”

Lutz said, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about our Tim. We look after him, hey, Tim? Don’t we look after you?”

Tim shrugged. He said, “Do you like dick? More cock?”

Sean screwed up his face. “You what?”

Lutz laughed. “It’s his little joke. He asks everyone that. They’re writers. Science fiction writers. You know. Philip Dick, isn’t it, Tim? Do Androids Dream of Electric Blankets?”

“Sheep.”

“Sheep blankets then. Whatever. And Michael Moorcock. I never read anything by them, but Tim here has always got his face in a book.”

“What you into there?” Sean asked. He was frustrated. He wanted to ram Tim into the wall and ask him what he had been doing at Naomi’s funeral. None of the others had been there, as far as he could tell. Tim shifted, obviously uncomfortable with the sustained interest in his business. Sean saw now how, behind those gritty lids, Tim’s eyes vibrated and jerked like the numbered balls in the National Lottery.

“Harrison. M John, not Harry. The Committed Men.” His voice soughed out of him. He seemed to diminish under the effort.

“Good?”

Tim shrugged. “Yeah.” His bovine scrutiny of Sean over, he went back to his paperback.

“We’ll give you something simple to start you off with,” Robbie said, drawing on a pair of thick gloves. “Grab a pair of these. Over there by the door.”

Robbie took him through to what must once have been the kitchen in this particular flat. Sawn-off drains thrust through the floor like severed limbs. “Lump hammer,” Robbie continued. “Highly technical this bit… take the hammer and twat the Christ out of that dividing wall till there’s nothing left.”

“That’s it?” said Sean, shedding his jacket.

“How hard do you want the job to be, mate?” said Nicky, who had followed them through. “Listen, me and Lutz are going to make a start on the flat across the landing. Robbie’ll give you any advice you need. Want tea? Tabs? A fiver putting on Wet Dream in the three-thirty at Ascot? Tim’s yer man.”

“Right,” said Sean. “Thanks.”

He had never used a lump hammer before; he couldn’t even remember if he had ever held one. Its weight intimidated him. Aware of Robbie observing him, Sean hefted the tool, left hand gripping the end of the handle, right hand circling the neck, just under the dense block of iron. He stood adjacent to the wall, left foot in front of his right, and brought the hammer back over his head, grunting as he swung it up and forwards, at the same time letting his right hand slide down the shaft to meet the left.

“Fuck me,” Robbie said, as a quarter of the wall disintegrated. “Take it easy, mate. You’ll end up in hospital if you carry that on. Pace yourself. It’ll come down whether you give it five blows or fifty. It’s you who’s got to wake up in the morning, come in here and do it all over again.”

“I’m okay. I’m up to it.”

Robbie winked and left him.

Twenty minutes on, stripped to the waist and with sweat stinging his eyes, Sean had to stop. The wall, after that first impact, had proven to be stouter than he expected. Pock marks cratered the plaster; brick peeked through, obstinate. He had to get around the site. Make a connection.

He was about to go back to work when he heard the scratch of a shoe on the linoleum. Tim was standing there, his paperback dangling from his hand, one finger hooked inside it to keep his page. He looked at Sean for a long time, but then Sean saw how he was trying to coax some form from the wet ruin of his mouth.

“I’m going to the offy,” he said. “Peanuts. Want a beer? Salty doesn’t mind if you have the odd beer.”

Sean could think of nothing he wanted more, but he felt it was necessary to hold back a bit. If there was a weak link here, Tim might be it. His way in. And for that to happen, he had to behave differently from all the others Tim schlepped for.

“No, thanks,” he said. He didn’t wait to see how long his answer would take to sink in. He went back to the wall. Thinking about Naomi refuelled him. The bricks didn’t stand a chance.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: DEADSTRETCH

“ELI? ELI? COME on, chicken. Come on, wake up.”

Will watched her surfacing, struggling through any number of levels of sleep, or unconsciousness. Finding shallow areas, close to wakefulness, the pain set in, and he gripped her hand as hard as she gripped his.

“Where does it hurt, Eli?”

He had delicately lifted her jumper in an attempt to locate the source of the blood. A large bruise had wrapped itself around the side of her body, covering an area the size of a twelve-inch record. A small cut below her left breast had stopped bleeding and didn’t look as serious as he had feared. He didn’t know the extent of her internal injuries, if there were any. Will felt himself go weak at the thought of losing another woman, so close to him, in the space of twenty-four hours.

“We have to get you to a hospital, chicken,” he whispered. Elisabeth’s eyelids fluttered and for a moment she pinned him with a lucid, almost amused look. Then she drifted off again. Another shadow fell across her, and then a pair of small hands, probing and pressing.

“She won’t need the hospital. It isn’t all that serious.”

Will turned and smiled at the girl. “How can you know that? We’ll need some kind of stretcher. We need to get her on the road. Maybe we can flag down one of those helicopters.”

The girl came nearer. “There’s really no need. My father was a doctor. He taught me lots about accident victims. I know just about everything you need to know about car crash trauma.”

“Then why won’t she wake up?”

“She’s in shock. The body is just enforcing a period of calm, that’s all. She needs to rest. There’s no breaks. If she suffered any organ damage, we’d know all about it by now. She’d be dead. Just keep her lying down, with her legs raised.”

Will wanted to believe her but her reading of Elisabeth’s apparent distress as perfectly harmless was of no comfort to him. He assessed the girl again. She must have been around sixteen or seventeen years old. Freckles banded her nose. Her hair was long and blonde, but could have done with a wash. It hung limply against her shoulders. She wore a grubby white halter top and well-worn jeans. Converse sneakers. A tattoo, some Chinese symbol, made a black slash across the biceps of her left arm. Her name was Sadie. He had no idea yet as to why she was hiding out in an abandoned farmhouse. Small-talk wasn’t high on his current list of things to do.

“So okay, she’s out of the critical zone. Can we move her?”

“Why would you want to?” Sadie asked. “She can rest here. There’s plenty of food. Shelter’s good, if you find a part of one of the rooms that isn’t leaking.”

Will tried to read more from her face. He needed to know if he could trust her, quickly. But he had never been a great judge of character. “We need to get on,” he said, limply.

Sadie pouted. “Where are you thinking of going?”

“North,” Will replied. “We have to get to Warrington.”

“Nice,” she said, but Will couldn’t detect any sarcasm in her voice. “I’m heading north too.”

“Not with us, you’re not.”

Sadie smirked. “Oh really? Who’s stopping me?”

“Sadie,” Will said, in what he thought was his most authoritative voice. “We’re wanted. We’re being chased.”

At this, Sadie’s eyes widened. “Cool,” she purred. “I could help you.”

“No, really. Thanks but no.”

“You are being a total knob about this.”

Will smiled. “Am I?”

“Uh-huh. We’re both going north. What? You’re going to walk a few steps behind me all the way, are you?”

“I just think we’ll slow you down, that’s all.”

“Slow is good. I don’t mind slow.”

Will sighed. She was going to accompany them whether he liked it or not. “Okay,” he said at last. “What are you doing hiding here anyway?”

Sadie evaded the question. “We need something to carry your woman in.”

“She’s not my wo—”

“We could make a stretcher.”

They ended up lashing together some wooden planks from one of the barns. Will tied two lengths of rope to one end which he criss-crossed around his chest. Now Elisabeth could be transported, albeit roughly, across the terrain. Sadie strapped her in with more rope, wrapped with strips of cloth to prevent it from chafing her skin.

“How far are we from Warrington, do you reckon?” Will scanned the horizon beyond the radio masts. Rain was collecting there in dense blankets of cloud.

“I don’t know. Hundred miles?”

A hundred miles. Will struggled to come to terms with the situation, the ease with which they had been thrown off course. By now they should have arrived in Warrington; they might even have solved the puzzle of Sloe Heath. His gut churned when he thought that he might have been reunited with Cat by now or at least discovered what had happened to her, but instead he was faced with the insidious prospect of tramping across country for what? A week? Two weeks? How long could it take?

“We can take it in turns if you like,” Sadie said, brightly, skipping ahead. “Come on. Race you.”

The air freshened, seemed to crystallise around him as he began his journey. The scattered cars on the M1 sent thin streams of smoke across his path, turning the field and those beyond into an uncertain wilderness. It led away to a horizon that was black and bleak. He thought he might die somewhere up there, if they found neither help nor a road that might transport them more easily.

The ropes squeaked as they bit into his flesh and the stretcher began to make tracks in the soil. Sadie danced and spun in front of him. Despite everything, he had to smile.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: SUPPLE BODIES

CHEKE WAITED UNTIL nightfall to move on, partly because it seemed necessary but partly because she could see and smell and taste more. Often in the past week she had entertained the notion that, just as babies born in water have a natural affinity with it, she would realise an innate kinship with the dark. She wasn’t close enough to herself yet to establish it as fact, though echoes and hints of a previous (or parallel) existence rumoured it was true. Even these thoughts were less than solid. Once more she’d lost her grasp on who she was, despite Susannah’s shocked utterance of her name that morning. The knowledge she was being enveloped, or developed, by another presence was the only clue to reassure her that she was a different individual to the one she glimpsed in mirrors. It was a frightening ordeal, and a dying voice within pleaded for her to resist the alien intruder before, like a germ in the blood, it was digested completely. But the promise of reality was the scent of fresh blood in a pack hound’s nostrils. She lusted after it and beggar the consequences.

Around her, like wax mannequins kissed by flame, lay the people who had once been housemates of hers, though some hours had passed since she’d been able to put names to faces. Now their bodies had grown runny as soup. Simon, Susannah and Jonathan were indistinguishable from each other: a lumpen, greasy mass from which appeared tufts of hair, white knobs of bone, the odd smear of colour as a sightless eye surfaced and sank again. The how and why of her attack paled before a craving that brought her away from the window. As she absorbed this human porridge she became aware that twin appetites were being sated: basic, physical hunger but also a need for information in the genealogy of her victims. An infusion of biological codes set her limbs itching for further re-alignments, but she exercised restraint until all but their clothes had been liquefied and drawn inside her. She was able to sleep then, while she watched the night deepen, and waited for her body to relax.

Her dreams took place in a strange hinterland comprising what she as human and she as intruder recognised as home; an environment which if split into its constituent parts might prove unremarkable, but when mixed became something exciting and novel. People she guessed were related to those she had ingested flitted through her mind.

She wondered idly what the original Cheke must be like, that which was now busily being sucked away, replaced, improved upon. An image, like a mudlocked bubble, shifted from deep within, scattering these dream faces, scorching the well-known and alien streets and buildings until an oily blackness frothed behind her eyes, alive with revelation. Tissue-thin, the blockage suggested her true identity, but before her curiosity was satisfied a pain wound itself about her spine, skating brief as breath upon glass into the parts of her brain she still clung to as her own, gilding them with icy leaves which creased her into oblivion. Her own truth was not for her eyes, it would seem.

Cheke had absorbed Susannah last. She was different from any of the women with whom she had so far been in contact; glossier, more polished. Her hair was long and shiny, not prone to the knots and tangles that Cheke found worming through her own tresses. Susannah’s body was firmer, with round curves that did not dimple or crease when Cheke pressed her fingers into them. Her teeth were white and, to Cheke, almost too small to chew with; her eyes, until death spirited it away, carried an intelligent shine. Even her skin felt vibrant. More real than the stuff that packaged Simon or Jonathan. It was tight and supple in the same moment, maddeningly so.

She enjoyed Susannah, and pushed her body to the fore as quickly as possible after she was ingested. She liked the way her breasts had a solid but pliable feel to them. She jiggled them in front of the mirror and they moved with a languor that made her mouth dry. She had found pictures of men with their mouths attached to these things in magazines under Jonathan’s bed. Eyes closed, lips working the nipple, biting lightly. Sucking. The women on the receiving end liked it, this sucking. This gentle devouring of their bodies. She had studied the way their heads were thrown back, their bodies arched to offer as much flesh as possible. Fingers laced behind a head. Teeth bared. She saw pictures too of women with penises in their mouths.

She had investigated Jonathan’s body within herself, and Simon’s too. Their penises had been thin and pale, like worms, or noodles. The guard she had absorbed at Gleave’s place was better. His penis was so thick she was unable to enclose it within the ring formed by her thumb and forefinger. She could grip it with both hands and smell its gamey flesh as she teased back the prepuce. She liked its wine-dark colouring, and the way the foreskin shifted against the inner meat as she pulled and squeezed it between her fingers. She liked its soft-hard feel, like marble enveloped in padded velvet. She wondered how it might feel in her mouth. She wondered if this was something that made a woman a woman.

She touched herself in the places the men had concentrated on in the pictures but didn’t feel anything that made her want to open her mouth or close her eyes. She felt cheated. She didn’t feel as though she were as close as she might be to finding out what being human felt like. Almost being people wasn’t enough.

What could she do though? If there were any real avenues to explore, tangible opportunities, would she follow them through? Wouldn’t it be too dangerous to expose herself like that? The thing was, for every memory or characteristic of her own that she lost, a new one replaced it, slipping so seamlessly into the mosaic of her being that it was at once incontrovertibly her. It was slowly erasing who she was, all this sublimation. But it had her now, like appetite or addiction. For each reservation about her undoing there was a fillip to be found in her enhancement. It was difficult for her panic to develop muscle: no matter the origin of the She, her mind continued to assimilate information as an I, which rendered invalid the fear of her own diminishment. There’d been a sense of maturation despite the continual upheaval of brain and brawn, the re-configuration of all she was and all she might be. Strands of her that felt attached to some pre-ordained pattern now twisted and coiled with new filaments, creating a brand new weave of destiny. Like a re-programmed computer she was suddenly, if vaguely, aware of a fresh list of ambitions, needs and purposes. These involved people she didn’t yet know, though she couldn’t work out what would happen when she found them. Hopefully, as had already happened, instinct would take over when the need arose.

She felt better than she had for a long time. The rest had done her good, but she also felt brighter, more alert. For the first time, she felt confident that she could do the work that had been asked of her and she shivered with the promise Gleave had made, that she would know what it was to be a woman, a real woman, when the last of those targets had had their throats cut.

Her hands had been busy while she dreamed and plotted. She slipped the bracelet onto her wrist and turned it this way and that in the flickering flames of the candles. They really were such small teeth; too small to chew anything tough, she supposed. But now, in this light, they looked a little like pearls.